Book Beginnings: No One is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading and TBR 23 in 23 on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, last year I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I’m back with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

Dear Chaya,

    I am sitting with you on my lap, by the window. There are ice crystals on the glass. If I put my ear close enough I can almost hear them cracking and growing. It’s not snowing now, but it has been all morning. Even though you have only been alive a few days, your story, our story, started a long time ago.

Last week I featured the 1998 memoir Thanks to My Mother by Schoschana Rabinovici. The week before it was the 2008 historical novel Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian.  This week it’s Ramona Ausubel’s 2012 historical novel No One is Here Except All of Us. As you might have seen in an earlier post, I recently grabbed this one from my small town public library with Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge and The Intrepid Reader’s Historical Fiction Reading Challenge in mind. Here’s what the novel’s Amazon page has to say.

In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years- across oceans, deserts, and mountains-but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch.

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