SarahMcCoy.com

From Crown Publishing Group: 

          In the tradition of Sarah’s Key and Those Who Save Us, Sarah McCoy returns with a timely novel about the politics of exclusion, the terrible choices we face in wartime, and the redemptive power of love. 

If you look out Reba Adams’s back door, you can see all the way to Mexico. Ciudad de Juarez is just over the Rio Grande river, and Reba’s boyfriend, Riki, an agent with the U.S. Border Patrol, makes sure that everyone stays on their respective sides. Reba is a journalist for the El Paso monthly, and while Riki finds comfort in strict rules and regulations, Reba knows that in every good story, some lines will be blurred.

          Reba’s latest assignment is a feel-good Christmas piece about an elderly baker across town. The interview should take a few hours at most, but Elsie, owner of Elsie’s German Bakery, is no easy subject. She keeps turning the tables on Reba–if Reba and Riki are engaged, why doesn’t she wear his ring?–and Reba finds herself returning to the bakery again and again. For Elsie, Reba’s questions have brought back memories of a darker time: her life in Germany during the last desperate year of WWII. And as Elsie, Reba, and Riki’s lives become more intertwined, all three are forced to confront the uncomfortable truths of their pasts and seek out the courage to forgive.

“The book is ripe with the lush island’s landscape, culture, and foods, as well as the political upheaval of the 1960s. Verdita’s experience, though, is universal, as she must reconcile both the passion she witnesses and the changes in her own body with a child’s perspective of the world. McCoy’s intoxicating novel is perfect for multicultural literature classes and best compares with Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (Knopf, 1994) and Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents(Penguin, 1992).”- School Library Journal review