Nar­rat­ing this nov­el in a free verse style that reads like prose, 16-year-old Sarah tells the sto­ry of the sum­mer she spends work­ing on an Israeli kib­butz. For an Amer­i­can girl from a small, main­ly Chris­t­ian town, in Penn­syl­va­nia who con­sid­ers her­self a dork and an out­sider, it is a trans­for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence. Along with the thrill of belong­ing as a Jew in a Jew­ish land, Sarah expe­ri­ences her first taste of inde­pen­dence and her first roman­tic encoun­ters with boys. Her impres­sions of Israel, espe­cial­ly Jerusalem and the area of the Galilee where she works as a kib­butz vol­un­teer, are ide­al­is­tic but acute; they will evoke mem­o­ries in any read­er who has already been there and will arouse curios­i­ty in those who haven’t. Her per­son­al growth, achieved with some pain but also with much sat­is­fac­tion, is beau­ti­ful­ly por­trayed; Sarah is a char­ac­ter with whom many teenage read­ers will iden­ti­fy and ulti­mate­ly, admire. Oth­er char­ac­ters are seen through her eyes and emerge as dis­tinct and dimen­sion­al indi­vid­u­als, espe­cial­ly the two Israeli boys to whom she is attract­ed. When one of them, a sol­dier, is killed, Sarah’s almost idyl­lic sum­mer is shat­tered and for the first time, she longs for the safe­ty of her home in Amer­i­ca. This inci­dent is one of a few that relate to polit­i­cal issues and all of them are dealt with sub­tly, pro­vid­ing con­text for a sto­ry about liv­ing in present-day Israel and back­ground to the lives and feel­ings of the young Israelis with whom Sarah inter­acts. The con­clu­sion, once Sarah is back in the Unit­ed States and apply­ing to col­leges, affirms her com­mit­ment to Israel and illus­trates the options open to almost all Jew­ish Amer­i­can young peo­ple. This is the author’s first nov­el and, like two oth­er recent nov­els about con­tem­po­rary Israel, Pni­na Moed Kass’s Real Time and Tam­mar Stein’s Light Years, it is high­ly rec­om­mend­ed for teenagers.