Peg­gy Mott is almost thir­teen. She is an only child, liv­ing and work­ing on her family’s farm in West Branch, Iowa. It is the sum­mer of 1941 and the Unit­ed States is on the verge of enter­ing the war rag­ing in Europe and Asia, but Amer­i­cans are divid­ed about both the prob­a­bil­i­ty of that sce­nario and if they are pre­pared to fight a dis­tant ene­my. Peg­gy sees her­self as an out­sider: ​“Some peo­ple are not meant to be paid atten­tion to, and I am one of those peo­ple.” But when her cousin Delia becomes ill with leukemia, the con­fig­u­ra­tion of her entire world changes. 

The close bond between the two cousins is part­ly based on the con­trast between book­ish Delia and math­e­mat­i­cal­ly log­i­cal Peg­gy. Sud­den­ly, that dif­fer­ence becomes fraught with impli­ca­tion. (In her after­word, the author explains that Delia’s ill­ness would be suc­cess­ful­ly treat­ed today.) H. M. Bouw­man takes risks in pre­sent­ing the most dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion imag­in­able with qui­et dra­ma and intense sen­si­tiv­i­ty. The clar­i­ty of her prose, and her abil­i­ty to enter the minds and hearts of a range of char­ac­ters, make this com­pelling sto­ry unforgettable.

The book’s title refers to a board­ing school, which has been trans­formed into a hos­tel for refugees from Europe, includ­ing Jews. Mem­bers of the Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty staff the lodg­ing and pro­vide sup­port for its res­i­dents. When two Jew­ish refugees from Ger­many — the teenaged Gun­ther and Pro­fes­sor Abram Lohman — move in, Peggy’s nar­row hori­zons become broad­ened. She devel­ops a crush on Gun­ther, who has lost his entire fam­i­ly to the Nazis, with­out any under­stand­ing of the ter­ror he has con­front­ed. Gunther’s appeal as an exot­ic stranger is one more part of Peggy’s con­fu­sion about who she real­ly is, and her sense of help­less­ness at being unable to save Delia. When Joe, a Quak­er class­mate, asks her to play chess with the pro­fes­sor, Peg­gy agrees. More impor­tant­ly than focus­ing on the strate­gies of chess, she becomes acquaint­ed with some of the Jew­ish texts and tra­di­tions that the pro­fes­sor draws upon to shed light on his unfath­omable experiences.

Jew­ish char­ac­ters are not ide­al­ized in this sto­ry. Gun­ther is angry. His appar­ent rejec­tion by a young woman vol­un­teer­ing at the hos­tel becomes fused with his rage at the mur­der of his fam­i­ly. Pro­fes­sor Lohman’s appar­ent inabil­i­ty to admit that his own rel­a­tives have also been killed is frus­trat­ing to Gun­ther, who some­times seems to feel con­tempt for the old­er man. Even the professor’s fre­quent allu­sions to Jew­ish midrashim and folk­lore are deeply ambigu­ous, a tac­it admis­sion that they can nev­er be used to explain Jew­ish vic­tim­iza­tion. He tells the bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive of Korah’s rebel­lion against Moses to Peg­gy, but when she press­es him for its mean­ing, he replies, ​“You want a moral? Morals are sil­ly.” Lat­er, he shares the midrash about Rab­bi Ish­mael and his fol­low­ers, all exe­cut­ed by the Romans. When Peg­gy express­es dis­tress at the story’s appar­ent accep­tance of their deaths, Pro­fes­sor Lohman offers only the cryp­tic response that ​“the sto­ry is say­ing that. I most cer­tain­ly am not.”

Bouwman’s nov­el embraces con­tra­dic­tion. Psy­cho­log­i­cal acu­ity takes the form of both direct speech and pre­cise metaphor. When Peg­gy sum­ma­rizes the trou­bling secrets threat­en­ing her abil­i­ty to cope, she com­pares them to ​“new­born chicks, still damp and beau­ti­ful and not yet stalk­ing you and con­spir­ing against you.” That ten­sion between inde­pen­dence and con­nec­tion are at the heart of this high­ly rec­om­mend­ed, dif­fi­cult, and beau­ti­ful book.