BooksForTopics Reading for Pleasure Recommendations
The Sky Over Rebecca is a compelling story from a stellar new voice in children’s literature. As an unpublished manuscript, it won the Bath Children’s Novel Award 2019 and early readers have been spellbound by Matthew’s storytelling and the hopeful, powerful message he conveys.
The Sky Over Rebecca is a timeslip novel, which follows a ten-year-old girl, Kara, as she follows some mysterious footprints that have appeared in the snow around her home in Stockholm. Those footprints lead Kara to Rebecca and her younger brother Samuel. They are Jewish refugees – from another time, World War Two – and they are trying to find their way home. It is a perfect read for school groups studying World War 2 and for fans of David Almond, Piers Torday and Amy Wilson. The plot brings to life the realities of children affected by war in a way that is very timely for the world we live in now.
Read on for a review of the book and a guest post by author Matthew Fox about the theme of crossing borders in the story…
Review
Book Title: The Sky Over Rebecca (available here)
Author: Matthew Fox
Publisher: Hachette
Publication Date: April 2022
Most Suitable for: Years 5-6
Reviewer: Claire Bennett
This award-winning fiction (Bath Children’s Novel Award in 2019) features Kara Lukas, a promising 11-year-old, who resides in Stockholm. with her mother.
Kara enjoys spending her time ice skating and stargazing with her beloved grandpa, when one day she discovers an old coin with a very distinctive mark, from a very dark time. Intrigued by this relic as well as the mysterious appearance of puzzling snow angels, Kara’s curiosity leads to the discovery of a Jewish girl, called Rebecca, and her little brother. The siblings have been hiding on a nearby island, surrounded by a frozen lake. What is more, they are in desperate need of her help.
This immersive, historical fiction spans time and location as Kara learns more about Rebecca, and the challenges she has faced in her life in Germany in 1942. Whilst Kara’s own strength is tested as she faces a challenge of her own in the form of the relentless and tormenting Lars.
Driving the story is Kara’s perseverance. Her motivation to help those in need, regardless of the cost, is inspiring. Her determination to overcome an unforgiving evil will leave you gripped and unable to put the book down.
Matthew Fox’s writing deals very sensitively with themes of love and loss. Through his development of well-rounded characters, we experience both triumph and tragedy. Set in modern-day Sweden, young readers will be able to relate to the heroine Kara. Through her, they will in turn develop an understanding of some children’s experience of a much darker time, a time filled with hate and destruction.
Though the subject matter is somewhat dark, the narrative is beautiful and the connection between the two main characters, Kara and Rebecca, is magical. The story highlights the importance of human connection. This book would be ideal as a whole class text. There are many key opportunities for discussion as well as self-reflection.
Order The Sky Over Rebecca online from Amazon or Bookshop.
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Guest Post
by Matthew Fox, author of The Sky Over Rebecca,
Crossing Borders
There’s a scene I cut from The Sky Over Rebecca shortly before I sent it off to the Bath Children’s Novel Awards. It’s a scene in which Lars, the bully, is out on the frozen lake with his gang. He uses an ice pick to score a line in ice to mark a part of the lake as ‘their’ area. It’s ‘his’ kingdom – he’s drawn a border around it. Ten-year-old Kara, skating home after lunch with her grandfather, unwittingly crosses this line. She doesn’t know it’s there; she doesn’t even see it. Lars stops her, and orders her back across his imaginary border – and with everyone watching, Kara does so, humiliated.
There were reasons to keep the scene, notably the rising pitch of conflict between Kara and Lars. But it seemed to get too physical too early – and more importantly, I felt it was obvious. The idea of the scene, about borders, and who gets to decide where they are and who can cross them, was already there in the book.
Borders had become very important to me. Not so much because I’d crossed one myself when I moved from Liverpool to Sweden, but because of what was happening in the world. Brexit was underway; walls were being built to keep dreamers out; refugees were drowning in the seas around Europe. My personal life was changing, too: my father died and my daughter was born, and my way of dealing with these life events – of processing them – was to write. I wrote two YA novels (both of them unreadable) and put them away in a bottom drawer.
The following winter, I had an idea for a Middle-Grade novel about footprints magically appearing and disappearing in the snow, and I began sketching out the many different paths the story could take. Without thinking too much about it, I gave myself – in the writing of it – the freedom to cross any border I liked. I had to respect Kara’s POV (her voice holds it all together) but I could play with the border of time, the border of death, and the border of genre. So time-slips take us from modern-day Sweden to World War Two Germany and back, and there’s at least one scene in which Kara finds herself having a conversation with a ghost.
I’ve written elsewhere that I hope readers will forgive these border crossings of mine. What I’m trying to do is to write serious, magical novels for young readers: as serious as possible, and as magical as possible. But the magic can only get you into trouble; it can’t get you out of it. Kara has to face Lars on her own, in the real world.
Reflecting on The Sky Over Rebecca as publication day approaches, I see how much I owe to Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In (which is for slightly older readers), and Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden. There are border crossings in these stories – between worlds, and times – and snow and ice are special places where, for a while at least, a door is open to other possibilities. There’s a dark magic at play in these novels that fascinates me, and yet they’re serious books about friendship, and growing up, and what is gained and what is lost at the border of adulthood.
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Order The Sky Over Rebecca online from Amazon or Bookshop.
Many thanks to the publishers for sending us a review copy. Follow along with the other stops on the blog tour for more about the book.
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BooksForTopics Reading for Pleasure Recommendations The Sky Over Rebecca is a compelling story from a stellar new voice in children’s…
