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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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SOMEDAY WE WILL FLY

Rachel DeWoskin

From the author of BLIND, a heart-wrenching coming-of-age story set during World War II in Shanghai, one of the only places European Jews without visa could find refuge.
Warsaw, Poland. The year is 1940 and Lillia is fifteen when her mother, Alenka, disappears and her father flees with Lillia and her younger sister, Naomi, to Shanghai, one of the few places that will accept Jews without visas. There they struggle to make a life; they have no money, there is little work, no decent place to live, a culture that doesn't understand them. And always the worry about Alenka. How will she find them? Is she still alive?

Meanwhile Lillia is growing up, trying to care for Naomi, whose development is frighteningly slow, in part from malnourishment. Lillia finds an outlet for her artistic talent by making puppets, remembering the happy days in Warsaw when her family were circus performers. She attends school sporadically, makes friends with Wei, a Chinese boy, and finds work as a performer at a "gentlemen's club" without her father's knowledge.

But the conflict grows more intense as the Americans declare war and the Japanese force the Americans in Shanghai into camps. More bombing, more death. Can they survive, caught in the crossfire?

Rachel DeWoskin spent her twenties in China as the unlikely star of a nighttime soap opera that inspired her memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing. She is the author of Repeat After Me and Big Girl Small, which received the American Library Association's Alex Award for an adult book with special appeal to teen readers; Rachel's conversations with young readers inspired her to write her first YA novel, Blind. Rachel is on the faculty of the University of Chicago, where she teaches creative writing. She lives in Chicago with her husband, playwright Zayd Dohrn, and their two daughters.
Rachel and her family spent six summers in Shanghai while she researched Someday We Will Fly.
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Book

Published 2019-01-22 by Viking Books for Young Readers

Book

Published 2019-01-22 by Viking Books for Young Readers

Comments

The National Book Review just included it on a list of "5 Hot Books" Read more...

A beautifully nuanced exploration of culture and people. Read more...

lyrical, sensitive portrayal of families struggling to survive during wartime.

SOMEDAY WE WILL FLY by Rachel Dewoskin has won the Sydney Taylor Book Award for Young Adult Literature!

This unique view into a forgotten part of history is told with candid, yet lovely prose. While some aspects of the story are embellished, the book holds true to history. A great companion to SALT TO THE SEA.

SOMEDAY WE WILL FLY is the Winner of the National Jewish Book Award

Though I have written extensively about the Holocaust in novels... I had never before heard of the 23,000 Jews who fled to Shanghai for the duration of the war... In SOMEDAY WE WILL FLY Rachel de Woskin has taken the horrors and turned them into a YA novel that is terrifically moving and full of a kind of poetry in motion that is both terrifying and uplifting in equal measure.

Rachel DeWoskin's storytelling features an extraordinary combination of curiosity and kindness... Someday We Will Fly is a powerful, adventurous story of a teenager who confronts the brutal history with courage, love, and imagination. I could not put it down.

lovely article that Kirkus did on Rachel DeWoskin and SOMEDAY WE WILL FLY Read more...

An unusual portrait of what war does to families in general and children in particular... affirms the human need for art and beauty in hard times.

SOMEDAY WE WILL FLY was named one of Kirkus's Best YA Historical Fiction of 2019. The Kirkus editor who selected these books wrote an article on the common themes of this year's top titles, and chose to highlight SOMEDAY WE WILL FLY as "a superlative work of literature showing how being lifted completely out of one's element is a catalyst for development."

An engrossing and beautifully-rendered plunge into less-known Holocaust history, featuring the plight of Jewish World War II refugees in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.