Carol Lynch Williams – författare

For as long as she can remember, Sarah’s family life has revolved around her twin sister, Annie—the pretty one, the social one, the girl who can do anything. The person everyone seems to wish Sarah—with her crippling shyness—could simply become.

When Annie suddenly chops off her hair, quits beauty pageants, and gains weight, the focus changes—Annie is still the star of the family, but for all the wrong reasons. Sarah knows something has happened, but she too is caught in her own spiral after her boyfriend breaks up with her and starts hanging out with one of Annie’s old friends.

Annie is intent on keeping her painful secret safe. But when she and Sarah start spending time together again for the first time in years, walls start to break on both sides … and words that had been left unsaid could change everything.

Thirteen-year-old Kyra has grown up in an isolated polygamous community without questioning her father''s three wives and her twenty brothers and sisters. Or at least without questioning them much—if you don''t count her secret visits to the Mobile Library on Wheels to read forbidden books, or her meetings with the boy she hopes to choose for herself instead of having a man chosen for her. But when the Prophet decrees that Kyra must marry her 60-year-old uncle—who already has six wives—Kyra must make a desperate choice in the face of violence and her own fears of losing her family.

It is October 16, 1943, and Hitler’s invasion of Europe is spreading like unquenchable fire. In a ghetto in Rome, the Nazis begin rounding up the city’s Jews for deportation to deadly concentration camps.

Twelve-year-old Emanuele makes a desperate attempt to save his mother. Instead, he’s chased by German soldiers and must take refuge on a Roman streetcar traversing the city. Stop after stop, Emanuele hides in plain sight for three full days, hoping to find his family alive and putting his own life into the hands of kind strangers who risk being shot for concealing a Jew.

A testament to good’s power over evil and based on real life events, The Streetcar to Life is a luminous tale of sacrifice, love, and of finding light when all else seems to go dark.

From the introduction:

My name is Emanuele Di Porto and I am ninety-one years old. On the morning of October 16th, 1943, when the Germans came to the ghetto to carry out a raid, my mother was taken and put on a truck. I ran into the street to save her, but instead she saved me. I have told my story for more than seventy years, but it has only recently gained recognition; many people now recognize me on the street and call me "the tram kid." But I have never been a kid, because at that time there was utter poverty, and everyone had to hurry to grow up and help their family. I have never been a kid, but I will never be old, because in my heart, time has stopped. My story is captured in this book, with some parts being completely true, and others embellished by Tea to bring the past to life.

After her grampa dies, the last place Libby expects to see him is sitting on the edge of her bed. But that’s what happens the night after the funeral.

Even more surprising is that Grampa has three important things to tell her: first, that she isn’t alone or forgotten—“The dead ain’t never that far from the living,” he says; second, that she has “the Sight”—the ability to see family members who have died; and third, that there is something special just for her in the lake. Something that could help her and her father—if she can find it.

Libby and Grampa try to help her father heal from his grief, but it will take all of Libby’s courage and her gift of Sight to convince her father that the dead are never truly gone.

Never That Far is set in the lush, rural landscape of central Florida and is a story that celebrates friendship, hope, and the power of family love.