The Gravedigger's Daughter

by Joyce Carol Oates

It's an engrossing book about a Jewish girl whose family flees from Nazi Germany at the beginning of World War II. She grows up American while her family struggles to fit into the new life there, denying their roots. Her dad, who was a math teacher at a prestigious school in Germany, now can only get the menial job of digging graves to support his family. It's a story of identity and how our pasts shape our lives.
--Bridgett Bird, Faculty