Guernica by Dave Boling
All I really knew about the Basque people when I picked up this book was that they speak a language with mysterious origins and live on either side of the Pyrenees in Spain and France. Boling's beautiful novel tells the story of a Basque family before, during and after the bombing of the historic Basque town of Guernica. The book also brings in the role of Picasso's Guernica painting and English people who took in the orphans of Guernica. Although much of the book is harrowing, there's a great surprise at the end. It's a haunting, beautifully written novel that I found very hard to put down.
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Cathryn Clinton's The Eyes of Van Gogh
My new friend Cathryn Clinton has an impressive list of novels for young readers. The Eyes of Van Gogh is a moving, highly-descriptive story about a young woman's struggles after she and her mother move yet again -- this time to a fictitious Lancaster County town. Clinton's youthful protagonist finds herself flourishing for the first time in her life, but danger lurks among the green farm fields of the Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Even though I rarely read young adult novels, I found Clinton's nuanced and yet gut-wrenching tale hard to put down.