"One of those deceptively guileless novels, like A Member of the Wedding and To Kill a Mockingbird, that sees more than it lets on." —New York Times Book Review 

“A book of acute insight and delicious humor. . . . Absorbing and poignant and full of difficult truth.” —Rosellen Brown, New York Magazine 

Though radio broadcasts grow more harrowing every day, and soon, swastika-marked envelopes begin to arrive from cousins overseas, but the fighting in Europe still seems far away from the idyllic California home of ten-year-old tomboy Suse Hansen. But after Pearl Harbor, everything changes. In Ella Leffland’s beautifully wrought story of a young girl’s coming of age during WWII, the fighting in Europe looms behind the tranquility of family, friends, and neighbors—until the darkness of the war becomes suddenly, irrevocably real.

Ella Leffland is the author of five books, including the critically acclaimed The Knight, Death and the Devil. She lives in San Francisco.