A Ceiling Made of Eggshells

[psocoptera]

A Ceiling Made of Eggshells, Gail Carson Levine, 2020. Historical fiction middlegrade from the author of Ella Enchanted and other fantasy novels. This is about a Jewish girl in Spain in the years leading up to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, combining historical events with glimpses into the daily life of a wealthy Jewish family. As I think I mentioned back when I read The Bird King, I studied the Reconquista every year in Spanish class but always from the Catholic-Spanish perspective, so it's pretty interesting to look at that time period from other angles. And then, also, I have a longstanding disproportionate fascination with the Jewish branch of my ancestry, and so there's a temptation to read the historical parts of this as possibly representing some my own family history - expulsion from Spain to Portugal to the Netherlands is totally a path by which Jews came to the Netherlands. (Or my much more recent Spanish ancestors could be descended from conversos...) Not a huge amount of story here as a novel - the protag is torn between her desire to get married and have children and her role supporting her aging grandfather - but some of the episodes with Christians trying to force their conversion were pretty tense. Recommended if this is the kind of thing that interests you. I'm thinking of buying a copy for Junie, so that even if she isn't interested enough to read it right now, it can be sitting there on her bookshelf as an option when she's bored someday. (Or, that matter, for Q. Huh, I wonder if he would let me read him All Of A Kind Family...) Content notes for child death, animal death, plague, and historical anti-Semitism.