Emily Barth Isler

This book is a gift to the culture. --Amy Schumer, writer, actor, and activist After her brother's death from a congenital heart defect, twelve-year-old Lucy is not prepared to be the new kid at school--especially in a grade full of survivors of a shooting that happened four years ago. Without the shared past that both unites and divides her classmates, Lucy feels isolated and unable to share her family's own loss, which is profoundly different from the trauma of her peers. Lucy clings to her love of math, which provides the absolute answers she craves. But through budding friendships and an after-school mime class, Lucy discovers that while grief can take many shapes and sadness may feel infinite, love is just as powerful.

Twelve-year-old Rosie is a musical prodigy whose synesthesia allows her to see music in colors. Her mom has always pushed her to become a concert violinist, but this summer Rosie refuses to play, wanting a "normal" life. Forced to spend the summer with her grandparents, Rosie is excited to meet another girl her age hanging out on their property. The girl is familiar, and Rosie quickly pieces it together: somehow, this girl is her mother, when her mother was twelve. With help from this glitch in time―plus her grandparents, an improv group, and a new instrument―Rosie comes to understand her mother, herself, and her love of music in new ways.

From award-winning creators Emily Barth Isler and Vesper Stamper, this luminous and moving story shows what it means to see the world in a hopeful light, even when it is brokenThree pieces of broken glass sit on Grandma Inge’s windowsill.Even though they are small, sharp, and jagged, the light shines through them, casting beautiful rainbows on the wall. When Inge’s great-granddaughter asks why Inge has kept these shards, she learns decades-old stories from her great-grandmother’s life—from the joy of glass breaking at her wedding to harrowing reminders of smashed windows during Kristallnacht. And she comes to understand why we hold onto our memories both happy and sad.Evocative and soul-stirring, and with incandescent illustrations by Vesper Stamper, Three Pieces of Broken Glass—based on the personal history of author Emily Barth Isler—explores how we must seek to find beauty and strength in even the darkest, most broken times.