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Susan Meissner, author of The Last Year of the War

Elise Sontag is a typical Iowa 14-year-old in 1943 --- aware of the war but distanced from its reach. Then her father, a legal U.S. resident for nearly two decades, is suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer. The family is sent to an internment camp in Texas, where Elise feels stripped of everything beloved and familiar, including her own identity. The only thing that makes the camp bearable is meeting fellow internee Mariko Inoue, a Japanese-American teen from Los Angeles, whose friendship empowers Elise to believe the life she knew before the war will again be hers.

Week of April 6, 2020

Paperback releases for the week of April 6th include MRS. EVERYTHING by Jennifer Weiner, in which two sisters’ lives from the 1950s to the present are explored as they struggle to find their places --- and be true to themselves --- in a rapidly evolving world; Julia Phillips' DISAPPEARING EARTH, a debut novel that takes readers through a year in Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, where the disappearance of two sisters (ages 8 and 11) have an enormous impact on a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women; STONY THE ROAD, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them; and Yara Zgheib's poignant first novel, THE GIRLS AT 17 SWANN STREET, a haunting portrait of a young woman’s struggle with anorexia on an intimate journey to reclaim her life.