Thirteen-year-old Isabelle Day has just moved from Milwaukee to Minneapolis following her father’s death in the early 1960s. Isabelle makes a good friend in her neighbor Margaret—the girls both attend the nearby Catholic school, where their teacher is a sharp, singular, sometimes surprising nun—while the elderly McCarthy sisters who live downstairs befriend both Isabelle and her mom. Everything in this superb, understated novel unfolds through showing rather than telling as it explores the way grief can settle beneath the surface of people’s lives. Isabelle initially thinks the McCarthy sisters are nosy; she gradually realizes their concern and goodness are genuine. She isn’t sure about her friendship with Margaret’s best friend, Grace, but slowly finds solid ground as one of three. And she initially idealizes her dad, but eventually allows the memories of harder times to surface. Still, the truth she doesn’t think she can tell is that he committed suicide. There is not a huge emotional arc to this story in which grief and loss echo through the lives a number of characters. Yet hope, and often humor, is present all along, and by book’s end it is clear Isabelle, while still grieving, has not only settled into her new home, but feels surrounded by love. (Ages 10–13)

In Milwaukee, Isabelle Day had a house. And she had a father. This year, on Halloween, she has half of a house in Minneapolis, a mother at least as sad as she is, and a loss that’s too hard to think—let alone talk—about. It’s the Midwest in the early 1960s, and dads just don’t die . . . like that.

Hovering over Isabelle’s new world are the duplex’s too-attentive landladies, Miss Flora (“a lovely dried flower”) and her sister Miss Dora (“grim as roadkill”), who dwell in a sea of memories and doilies; the gleefully demonic Sister Mary Mercy, who rules a school awash in cigarette smoke; and classmates steady Margaret and edgy Grace, who hold out some hope of friendship. As Isabelle’s first tentative steps carry her through unfamiliar territory—classroom debacles and misadventures at home and beyond, time trapped in a storm-tossed cemetery and investigating an inhospitable hospital—she begins to discover that, when it comes to pain and loss, she might actually be in good company.

In light of the elderly sisters’ lives, Grace and Margaret’s friendship, and her father’s memory, she just might find the heart and humor to save herself. With characteristic sensitivity and wit, Jane St. Anthony reveals how a girl’s life clouded with grief can also hold a world of promise.