Imani has a guilty secret. After her great grandmother passes away, Imani, along with her brother, inherit Great-Grandma Anna’s books. While sorting through the many piles, Imani finds a journal. Even though the books are hers, she feels strange about keeping and reading this journal, and so hides it from her family.

With her closest friend, Madeline, they begin to read, soon learning it is a diary written from one twin to another as she sails from Luxembourg to New York. Anna was the only one of a family of 9 to flee the Nazis, with promises her family will follow.

As Imani reads, she feels a connection to Anna and her sense of misplacement. Imani is adopted, as is her brother Jaime. The older she gets, the more the desire to know where she comes from burns. Imani is the only black person among her Jewish family. Her bat mitzvah (a Jewish coming of age ritual for girls) is fast approaching and in place of a party, her parents have offered her a gift of her choice. That choice is knowing where she came from, but how can ask for such a thing without upsetting her parents?

As Imani continues to read the journal, she learns all about her adoptive great grandmother when she was the same age. The entries become darker and Imani researches the journal dates against what was happening in Luxembourg. Like watching a scary movie when you know where the villain is hiding before the actors do, Imani learns what happened to Anna’s family before she reads that entry in the journal. She dreads reading Anna’s reaction.

This dread is replaced by something else just as her parents learn of Imani’s wish to know more about where she came from. The resulting tumult of emotions tosses Imani around, until someone from Great Grandmother’s journal surfaces in her own life, helping pull everything together beautifully.

There are many stories, memoirs and journal/diary based novels about the horrors of the Holocaust, but this is something different. This novel shares the experiences of a young girl who escapes that terrible fate, but has left all she knows behind in her small country of Luxembourg. She believes her family will follow and so she writes a journal for her twin sister to read when she arrives in New York.

What makes this story even more special is the theme of identity in our time, with a young adopted black girl raised as Jewish in a white family; who increasingly wants to know where she came from. There are two hugely emotive subjects and the author treats them with the respect and emotion they deserve. Beautiful.

Author – Elissa Brent Weissman

Age – 8+

(New York, Secret, Twins, Family, Diversity, Belonging, Misplacement, Self, Adopted, Adoption, Tennis, Nazis, Ship Voyage, Grandparent, Historical, Diary, Journal)