Scattergood
by H. M. Bouwman
Intermediate, Middle School    Porter/Holiday    320 pp.
1/25    9780823457755    $18.99
e-book ed.  9780823462308    $11.99

It’s June 1941 in West Branch, Iowa, and twelve-year-old Peggy’s summer becomes marked by two secrets. The first is that she’s fallen for Gunther, who is handsome, older (sixteen), and, most importantly, from away. A German Jew, Gunther is staying at a local refugee hostel run by Quakers. The second secret, involving Peggy’s cousin and close friend, Delia, is more complicated. Delia has leukemia and has at most six months to live, but this reality is being withheld from the sick girl, who believes that she’s simply anemic. The events of the summer and fall—first love, revelations at the hostel against a background of war—all play out within the context of Peggy’s guilt, anger, resentment, confusion, preemptive grieving, and doomed determination to “fix” her cousin. By the end of six months, she has confronted the difficult truth that the distinctions among stories, lies, and history are not as clear as she had assumed. Bouwman’s (Gossamer Summer, rev. 7/23) writing is crisp and specific, painting a convincing picture of rural life of the period, and she stays firmly in the consciousness of her spirited, questing, analytical, mathematically inclined heroine.

From the March/April 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.