America splits into two incompatible futures: the United Progressive Regions and the God Fearing States. They occupy the same country with different laws, different religions, different ideas about who gets to exist safely.
Jeffrey is closeted and Jewish in the GFS, where both things are increasingly dangerous. A pen pal program pairs him with Dani Fine across the border—she’s in the UPR, openly queer, living in a space where his identity wouldn’t be a survival calculation. They start writing letters. The connection forms through words alone.
Judith Braverman is Jeffrey’s best friend. She’s Orthodox and she sees something most people don’t: the purity of human souls. It’s not mystical in the way the world understands mysticism. It’s just clarity. She sees people as they actually are, stripped of pretense. She gets pulled into the correspondence with Dani. Her letters join theirs.
The GFS starts tightening. New laws arrive monthly—protections, they call them. Anti-Semitic machinery wrapped in the language of safety. Judith responds by doing what she’s always done: papercutting. But now the traditional art becomes a cipher. She embeds codes into the delicate shapes, creates messages that look like nothing to anyone monitoring but carry meaning to the three of them. It’s a way to communicate that the government can’t decode because it doesn’t recognize it as communication at all.
When they finally meet in person—an impossible, dangerous meeting—Judith’s certainty about herself shatters. Dani isn’t an abstraction anymore. She’s a person Judith can see clearly, and what she sees is love. The kind that doesn’t fit into the Orthodox framework she’s built her life around. The kind that demands she choose between faith and safety and the person she’s becoming.
She’s seventeen. She has to decide now.
Details
| ISBN: 9781642472479 |
| Subtitle: |
| Genre: YA Fiction (Young Adult); Romance; Jewish Interests |
| Subject(s): Fantasy; Jewish; Lgbtq+; LGBTQ+ Books; Literature & Fiction; Post-Apocalyptic; Science Fiction; Science Fiction & Fantasy; Teen & Young Adult; World Literature |
| Publication Date: 2021-06-22 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Bella Books, Incorporated |
| Language: English |
| Format: Paperback |
| Pages: 198 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: |
| Book_ID: 105945 |