You Are One of Them

April 8, 2013
Fresh from college, adrift Washington, D.C., native Sarah Zuckerman heads to post–Cold War Moscow in search of clues about what happened to Jenny Jones, her childhood best friend. After she wrote a letter to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov asking for peace in 1982, when the girls were 10, Jenny was invited to the U.S.S.R. as a “peace ambassador” and became an international sensation. But three years later, she and her parents were killed in a plane crash—or so it seemed. In 1995, Sarah receives a letter from a Russian woman named Svetlana, who hints that Jenny might be alive. But once in drab, polluted Moscow, a “place of new money and ancient grudges,” Sarah worries that she’s being lied to and manipulated. Holt creates strong roots, both in 1980s America—with references to friendship pins, Casey Kasem, and the ever-persistent threat of nuclear war—and 1990s Moscow, where tracksuits and cigarettes are never far away. Telling details of Soviet oppression and Russia’s budding advertising industry paint a vivid portrait of a country testing the waters of democracy. Holt, who won a Pushcart Prize for her short fiction, writes with a pleasing, wry intelligence in this promising debut. Agent: Bill Clegg, WME Entertainment.

April 1, 2013
A novel that tells the story of best friends who grow up in D.C. during the Cold War, told from the perspective of the one who is less talented, less desirable and more real. Holt's short fiction has received a Pushcart Prize, and she was runner-up for the 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award. Our narrator and protagonist is Sarah Zuckerman. After Sarah's older sister's death from meningitis, her parents' marriage never recovers. Sarah needs a friend, and when the Joneses move in next door, she gets her wish. Jenny Jones' family is an advertisement for a particular form of American domestic happiness, and the outgoing Jenny is an advertisement for herself. It is the early '80s, the deepest chill of the Cold War, when Sarah begins a letter to Yuri Andropov, then leader of the Evil Empire. Jenny writes too, and Andropov replies to her. Jenny becomes a media darling, joins the popular clique at school, and leaves Sarah and her morose mother alone with their sorrows. A few years later, Jenny and her parents die in a plane crash. This fact of Jenny's disappearance, and the conspiracies surrounding it, define Sarah's life (Sarah's mother establishes a Jenny Jones foundation). After college, Sarah travels to Russia in response to a note from Svetlana. Svetlana, apparently, is the girl standing next to Jenny in all the photos from Jenny's visit as a child ambassador to the USSR. We never stray far from Sarah's cramped perspective, and this tries the reader's patience, as Sarah offers platitudes in place of insight. This debut novel only looks deeply at one character, Sarah, and she is not enough to sustain interest.

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April 15, 2013
Holt perfectly melds the personal and the political in this spot-on portrait of a girlhood friendship set against a Cold War backdrop. Sad 10-year-old Sarah Zuckerman, whose older sister has died and whose father has abandoned the family, finds great comfort in her friendship with Jennifer Jones, who lives across the street in their wealthy D.C. neighborhood. Then Jennifer becomes a media sensation when a letter she writes to Yuri Andropov asking for peace is made public. Sarah once again feels the sting of abandonment, and when Jennifer's family is ultimately killed in a plane crash, their friendship seems like a distant memory. Ten years later, upon graduating from college, Sarah receives a mysterious e-mail hinting that Jennifer might still be alive. She heads to Moscow and an internship, determined to find out the truth. Holt ably captures both the paranoia of the Cold War and the shabby yet genteel aura of an exhausted Moscow just after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. But it is her razor-sharp insights into the turbulent dynamics of female friendship that give this novel its heft.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2013

When Sarah and golden-girl friend Jenny write Soviet premier Yuri Andropov pleading for world peace, only Jenny gets a response--and dies in a plane crash shortly thereafter. But was it an accident? Coming of age becomes end-of-Cold War intrigue.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2013

Two kids living comfortably in Washington, DC, in the 1990s are best friends, though Sarah is shy and withdrawn while Jenny Jones is a Breck girl, sassy and pert. On a lark, they write to Yuri Andropov, the Soviet head of state, asking for world peace. He responds but only to Jenny, inviting her to the USSR. Jenny vaults to media stardom. The girls draw apart, but life goes on--until the Jones family perishes in a plane crash. Years later, in an offer to share memories, a Russian friend of Jenny's invites Sarah to visit. Sarah, with several painful defections already behind her, learns in boomtown Moscow that the Soviet propaganda coup had dark consequences for the Jones family. VERDICT Holt, once a copywriter and now an award-winning fiction author, evokes with perfect clarity the sparkling tones of friendship and the hollow clangs of betrayal. Holt's Cold War plot and setting make a fertile medium for growing the suspicion that loyalty is but love's plaything. This debut novel delivers a satisfying and mature narrative for all readers and may have a special resonance for young adults. [See Prepub Alert, 12/7/12.]--Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.