The Sydney Taylor Shmooze

The Meadowbrook Murders by Jessica Goodman G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2025 Category: Young Adult Reviewer: Michelle Falkoff   Buy at Bookshop.org Amy Alterman expected she’d have to do some apologizing after getting drunk at the big pre-senior-year party at her boarding school and fighting with Sarah, her best friend and roommate. Instead, she woke up to find their shared dorm room covered in blood. Sarah and her boyfriend had been murdered, and the knife Amy had borrowed from her townie boyfriend was missing. Liz Charles had never fit in at Meadowbrook, and the only way she’d be able to afford college would be if she won a big newspaper scholarship. But nothing ever happened at boarding school that was worth writing about, at least not until the murders. Now she had a story to report on, a story big enough for a win, if only the school would let her write about it. Neither Amy nor Liz would ever have imagined they’d become friends, but as suspicion for the murders increasingly began to ...

They Went Left by Monica Hesse Category: Young Adult Reviewer: Meira Drazin Eighteen years old in 1945 when the Gross-Rosen concentration camp is liberated, Zofia Lederman’s body and mind are left shattered. But she cannot forget or give up on her promise to find her little brother Abek—the only one from her family beside her not to be sent to the left when they arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau three years before—no matter what. So begins Monica Hesse’s THEY WENT LEFT, with Zofia first setting off for her former home in Sosnowiec, Poland and then across Poland and Germany to a displaced persons camp, where everyone is trying to piece together a future from a broken past. Although I personally write contemporary Jewish literature for children, I am very thankful that Holocaust literature is still being written by authors, bought by publishers, and read by new generations of young people. And I welcome in particular books such as THEY WENT LEFT that seek to shine a light on aspec...