What’s seven decades between friends? The narrator of Lois Lowry’s TREE. TABLE. BOOK (Clarion, 208 pp., $18.99, ages 8 to 12), 11-year-old Sophia Henry Winslow (who calls herself Sophie), has a best friend who’s 88 years old — another Sophie, last name Gershowitz, who lives next door to her in their small New Hampshire town. In spite of the age gap, the two have “a friendship of the heart,” as Sophie the younger puts it. They both adore “banana bread, otters, the color mauve … the Statue of Liberty and the composer Prokofiev”; they both detest “North Korea, reality TV, animal abuse and stewed rhubarb.”
Unsurprisingly, young Sophie’s classmates don’t get her. (Some readers may find her a bit much too, though she means well.) A walking dictionary, she sports plaid-frame glasses and lobbies for more veggies in the school cafeteria (not a recipe for popularity). She borrows the Merck Manual from her pal Ralphie, a doctor’s son, to look up diseases she worries she has.
The elder Sophie suffers from a real problem: dementia. She gets lost driving home and burns things on the stove. Her son, Aaron, wants to move her to a care facility near him in Akron, Ohio, but Sophie Winslow is determined to foil that plan.
Lowry has explored friendship and loyalty before, notably in her Newbery Medal-winning classic “Number the Stars” (1989), the story of a Protestant girl and her Jewish best friend in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen. This time the threat doesn’t arrive in jackboots; it creeps in with age.
Using tests from the Merck (“Ask the patient to recall three objects after a three-minute delay”), young Sophie sets out to prove that her chum is just fine. It doesn’t go the way she expects.
She can’t stop time or cure what’s wrong, which is a tough lesson to learn. But three words — tree, table, book — unlock memories the old woman has never shared: tales of her Eastern European childhood and what happened to her Jewish family when the Nazis came.
Lowry, now in her 80s, uses the story of the two Sophies to celebrate friends of all ages and help young readers process what happens when dementia begins to take hold of a loved one. But the book carries a warning, too, as the last survivors of World War II pass on: Stories need to be handed down or they die with their tellers.
Gayle Forman’s NOT NOTHING (Aladdin, 288 pp., $17.99, ages 10 and up) also taps into the power of intergenerational friendship, this time from the perspective of the (vastly) older friend.
At 107, Joseph “Josey” Kravitz can’t see well anymore, but his brain is as sharp as ever. Nobody in Shady Glen, his assisted-living facility, knows that, because he no longer talks.
“After a hundred years, you get a little tired of being the last one left in a conversation,” he notes, addressing his narrative to someone named Olka. “You get a little tired of everything, really.”
Then 12-year-old Alex barges into Josey’s life. “The boy,” as he calls him, has done something terrible, which Josey refers to only as “the Incident.” Alex’s social worker has sent him to volunteer at Shady Glen for the summer while he awaits his court hearing. It’s his last opportunity (a word Alex hates, having had it thrown in his face by too many authority figures) to avoid being shipped off to juvie. And he gets off to a rocky start: “The first thing the boy said when he entered Shady Glen Retirement Home was ‘This place smells like death!’”
The other summer volunteer, Maya-Jade, is a private school know-it-all with two attentive moms and a diva of a grandmother, another Shady Glen resident. It’s been nearly a year since Alex’s own mother, Alexandra, was taken from him by mental illness. He’s been dumped with his aunt and uncle, who barely speak to him: “The boy wasn’t even worth words.” But Josey, the silent centenarian, sees something in him.
When Alex comes to Josey’s room to deliver a meal and accidentally knocks a portrait off the wall, Josey cries out, “Olka!” — which he later explains is “short for Oleksandra, … or Alexandra, here.” Intrigued by the shared name, Alex asks what she was like.
From this point on, a second narrative stream, in which Josey opens up to Alex about his past, alternates with the first. He tells the boy about his life in prewar Poland as the son of a prosperous Jewish family; about how he and Olka, an unlikely pair, found love when she came to work as a seamstress in the Kravitz department store; and how she taught him to sew, a skill that saved his life after the Nazis invaded. In the process, he helps the boy understand how people can learn to “rise to the occasion of their lives” — Olka’s guiding principle.
Forman, the author of young adult novels that include “If I Stay” and the Just One Day series, handles the unusual split narration deftly, and lets tension build in both story lines. How did Josey survive the Holocaust, and what happened to Olka? How bad was “the Incident,” and what will it cost the boy? Past trouble can’t be undone, but talking about it with a friend makes it a little easier to bear.
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