A Sky Full of Song explores a lesser-known Jewish immigration experience in an introspective, compassionate story set in the North Dakota prairie in 1905. Susan Lynn Meyer (Black Radishes; New Shoes) positions the power of family identity against the allure of assimilation for a child who misses the best of home but finds much to love about the new "big and lonesome" land.
Shoshi Rozumny, her sisters and her mother flee escalating antisemitism in Liubashevka, Ukraine, and join her father and older brother, Anshel, who "rushed to leave for America" three years earlier, when faced with Anshel's conscription into the tsar's army. In "Nordakota," the Rozumny family joins homesteaders who have claimed free land--available "even for Jews"--and are working to "prove it up." Shoshi is awed by the landscapes, especially moved by birds migrating overhead, and humbled by the "enormous sky... deep with clouds, dizzyingly vast." School offers 11-year-old Shoshi an opportunity to make friends, but "trying to be like the others didn't keep the kids at school from thinking that [she] was different. Strange. Wrong." Shoshi and sister Libke, 14, are repeatedly othered and verbally harassed for being Jewish, including use of ethnic slurs; Shoshi is physically assaulted. Shoshi loves her family deeply, and wonders if they "should try to blend in a little more.... To keep bad things from happening." Learning to play her father's fiddle offers Shoshi an escape, and a harrowing incident during a whiteout storm teaches Shoshi that Judaism is both part of her proud past and important to her new beginning.
Meyer's contemplative first-person narration allows readers to share Shoshi's newcomer experience, including the joys and difficulties it entails. This character-driven storyline shines in descriptive passages, particularly where Shoshi wanders the prairie or practices the fiddle. "I played faster, harder, my heart grieving, my heart rejoicing. There--now!--was the gladness, the exultation, the yearning." Yiddish peppers the family's dialogue, and the suggestion is that the Rozumnys exclusively speak the language at home. A note references the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Dakota people displaced by it; references to Native Americans in the text offer an empathetic, modern perspective. A Sky Full of Song is reminiscent of Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter and would pair nicely with Linda Sue Park's Prairie Lotus to offer another perspective on culturally nondominant settlers.
A Sky Full of Song is a thoughtful piece of middle-grade historical fiction featuring a sympathetic protagonist from an underrepresented community participating in late westward expansion. --Kit Ballenger, youth librarian, Help Your Shelf
Shelf Talker: A Jewish girl faces hostility from peers in addition to the hardships of homesteading in a thoughtful, lyrical story set in early-20th-century North Dakota.