Finding Grace

Volume XXV / Issue 2 - September 14 / 2018

Finding Grace

Author: 
Daphne Greer
Halifax, NS: Nimbus, 2018
150 pp., trade pbk., $14.95
ISBN: 
978-1-77108-691-2
Grades: 
7-9
Ages: 
12-14
Review by: 
Teresa Iaizzo (Reviewed from Advance Reading Copy)
3
Excerpt: 

I stare at the piece of paper. It has a section for your mother’s side of the family and a section for your father’s. A lump lodges in my throat. I was left on the steps of the convent in a basket with a cloth diaper tucked in my blanket – just Dotty and me. I guess our parents couldn’t handle both Dotty and a new baby. Maybe they’d had enough of taking care of people after fifteen years of Dotty. I can’t stand up in front of the class with a blank page.

Grace, 13, is an orphan living in a Belgian convent in the 1970s with her sister Dotty. After years of Grace’s being her sister’s sole caregiver, Dotty unexpectedly dies, leaving Grace all alone for the second time in her life and sparking events which will have repercussions for years to come.

While conducting research for a school project, Grace discovers a hidden diary from the 1940s. The diary tells the story of a young girl turned nun who was tormented by her family, other nuns, and Nazis during World war II. Unbeknownst to Grace, this diary is actually the key to unraveling her own past.

Without giving too much away, Finding Grace is a brilliant coming of age story that focuses on the inner turmoil of a young girl who is grappling with who she is as a person. Without knowing any family outside her sister, Grace is desperate to discover where she comes from and, ultimately, to find out who she is. By the author’s interweaving Grace’s coming-of-age story with that of the mysterious author of the diary, readers come to understand how history sometimes has a funny way of repeating itself.

Recommended

Teresa Iaizzo is a librarian with the Toronto Public Library.