• Age: 12 to 14
• Grade: 7 to 9

When trapped or frightened, Esther sees windows --- and flying out of them --- as her only salvation. Young, Jewish and on the run from the Nazis, Esther is one of a group of children who manage to flee Germany for Belgium and then France at the beginning of World War II.

Despite her perilous situation, she frets over her frumpy looks, is ridiculed by the popular girls and loves a boy who --- at the best of times --- treats her like a sister. As the war rages on and Esther bears witness to its horrors, her pain and isolation grow --- until only the highest windows bring the promise of release.

Lynne Kositsky is an award-winning poet and the author of several novels in Penguin's Our Canadian Girl series, including Rachel: A Mighty Big Imagining, which won the White Raven Award. Lynne's fiction has been nominated for the Geoffrey Bilson, White Pine, Golden Oak, Hackmatack Awards, in 2006 she won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Youth for The Thought of High Windows. She lives in Vineland, Ontario, with her husband, Michael, a composer, and her two shelties, who provided the template for Tempest, the doggy character in Minerva's Voyage.

Lynne Kositsky's profile page

• Short-listed, White Pine Award, Ontario Library Association
• Runner-up, International Book Award, Society of School Librarians International
• Winner, YA Top Ten Fiction, Pennsylvania School Librarians Association

Kositsky's focus on human imperfection and quotidian detail poignantly reminds readers that the Holocaust - in all it inhumanity - happened to real human beings.

Horn Book

Kositsky deftly handles the irony of Esther's maturation - that her girlhood tendency towards self-destructive acts is finally overcome by horrors greater than low self-esteem. The conclusion, which finds Esther committed to the Resistance and the war still raging, forces readers to supply their own ending; cautiously hopeful is as good as it gets.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

Superb, wrenching Holocaust fiction.

Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

Kositsky has created an engaging, introspective narrator, and she uses detail to define even minor characters clearly. This is a mature novel, honest about the dangers and uncertainties of life for Jews during World War ll.

School Library Journal