Zebra Forest Hardcover - 2013

Excerpt

We called it the Zebra Forest because it looked like a zebra. Its trees were a mix of white birch and chocolate oak, and if you stood a little ways from it, like at our house looking across the back field that was our yard, you saw stripes, black and white, that went up into green. Gran never went out there except near dusk, when the shadows gathered. She didn’t like to be out in full sunlight usually, and told me once she didn’t like the lines the trees made. Gran was always saying stuff like that. Perfectly beautiful things — like a clean blue sky over the Zebra — made tears come to her eyes, and if I tried to get her to come outside with me, she’d duck her head and hurry upstairs to bed. But then it would be storming, lightning sizzling the tops of the trees, and she’d run round the house, cheerful, making us hot cocoa and frying up pancakes and warming us with old quilts. We had few rules in our house, but keeping out of the Zebra Forest in a storm was one of them.

Media reviews

Gewirtz veers away from melodrama, deftly capturing nuances of family dynamics in spare prose. ... [A]udiences will appreciate this novel’s multilayered characters and touching message of hope and forgiveness.
—School Library Journal (starred review)

Debut author Gewirtz successfully conveys the terror and tedium of being trapped...An emotionally honest family story with an ending that’s hopeful without being implausibly upbeat.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Citations

• Booklist, 04/01/2013, Page 82
• Bulletin of Ctr for Child Bks, 05/01/2013, Page 419
• Horn Book Magazine, 03/01/2013, Page 100
• Hornbook Guide to Children, 07/01/2013, Page 0
• Kirkus Reviews, 03/01/2013, Page 0
• Publishers Weekly, 02/25/2013, Page 0
• School Library Journal, 05/01/2013, Page 100
• Shelf Awareness, 04/12/2013, Page 0