Palaces of the Crow

In her tiny shtetlach, young Neriya plays games with the crows. In return, they bring her presents, and when the Nazis come to overrun her Jewish village, the birds lead her to safety in the Belarus forests. She is joined by three others: a Roma girl, an underage Polish soldier, and an unnamed, uncommunicative boy. Together, they witness the horrors of war and winter ravaging the landscape, while the crows protect the children and take them into the safety of their own nest-like settlement. Separated after the war and still scarred by what they’ve seen, what they’ve hidden, and what they’ve lost, they return to protect the crows as the crows once protected them. The Eastern European setting provides readers with a bleak portrait of life on the starving edge of the war, a desperate, frozen version of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See.