Displacement and Dysfunction: Two Novels

In Caroline Leavitt’s Cruel Beautiful World, it’s 1969, and sixteen-year-old Lucy is about to run away to live off the grid in rural Pennsylvania, a rash act that will have vicious repercussions for both her and her older sister, Charlotte. In A Place We Knew Well, Susan Carol McCarthy captures the shock and innocence, anxiety, and fear brought on by the Cuban Missile Crisis, and brings vividly to life one ordinary family trying to hold center while the world around them falls apart. Set in 1942 New York and Berlin, Janis Cooke Newman’s A Master Plan for Rescue is an enchanting novel of a child who worships his parents, then loses his father to an accident and his mother to her resulting grief.