Girls in the 1990s are uninterested in family memorabilia, religious heritage, and events that happened over half a century ago to people they’ve never met. So Anya finds being Jewish at Christmas a big pain: when her friends are trimming trees and anticipating mountains of presents, how can “oil burning for eight days” hope to compete? And when her grandmother gives her an old Menorah for Chanukah, Anya is not overjoyed.

Then she discovers that lighting the Menorah candles each night connects her to a girl from another time – Estie, a Jewish child in Nazi Germany. Over the eight days Anya is drawn more and more into Estie’s story. She assumes Estie must be her own grandmother. The truth is more surprising, a neat plot turn that rescues the story from cliché.

To bring important events from the past alive for young readers, Lynne Kositsky packages them for maximum consumer palatability. Her book is short. She handles the flashback segments with impressive economy, bringing a world of characters rapidly into focus, then whisking them off stage. Her present-day narrator is smart-mouthed and ironic, and her world – friendships, a pair of intellectually challenged golden retrievers, a rival sibling, her parents’ strange adult preoccupations – is one readers can enter with ease. The time-shift device is as comfortable as an old shoe, a click of the remote away. Curiously, Kositsky chooses to have Anya narrate her tale in summer, not at Christmas, and gives subplots equal time with Estie and the past. She could have put more trust in her story, her skill, and the attention spans of her young readers.