Two Suns in the Sky

Star-crossed lovers are the stuff of romantic dreams, but in Two Suns in the Sky Miriam Bat-Ami pursues this theme in an unlikely setting: the grim refugee camp at Oswego, New York, during World War II. Chris Cook, 15, is fed up with the boring town of Oswego but is fascinated by the exotic strangers living so close by. She and her friends sneak into the camp where she meets Adam Bornstein, a Yugoslavian Jew. "For stony limits cannot hold love out," says Shakespeare, and neither can the quarantine fences around the Emergency Refugee Shelter. The two fall passionately in love, in spite of their differences of language and religion--and the angry resistance of Chris's father to anything "foreign." Their voices, as distinctly different as their cultures, alternate in telling the story of their ill-fated attraction.

Miriam Bat-Ami, like Norma Fox Mazer in Good Night, Maman, has drawn on a forgotten piece of American history for her setting: the Emergency Refugee Shelter, the U.S. government's sole attempt to rescue Jews fleeing Hitler's persecution. Bat-Ami captures the collision of cultures in not only the poignant love story, but in the complex emotions of the townspeople, whose good will is tempered by a naive suspicion of strangers, and in the mixed feelings of the refugees themselves, whose gratitude for a place of warmth and shelter is dimmed by their frustration at finding themselves corralled behind barbed wire in the supposed land of the free. Quotations from former residents of the camp and a substantial Author's Note add to the strong authenticity of this intriguing novel. (Ages 11 to 15) --Patty Campbell