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2nd Annual ECC Board Book Club and Pot Luck! | July 14, 2015

by Marisa Finkelstein

The date was June 9. The year, 2015. On this day, an enthusiastic group of young publishing professionals gathered at the Children’s Book Council’s office for a delicious potluck dinner and a discussion of Ryan Graudin’s latest novel, Wolf by Wolf (Little, Brown), coming out in October 2015. The dinner included a myriad of choices—from chips to chickpea salad to chocolate-covered matzo—that fueled a lively conversation about this great book.

In a different time and place, the Third Reich and Imperial Japan won World War II. Yael, an escaped death-camp prisoner and the subject of a human experiment that has given her the power to skin shift, is the resistance’s next hope for a better world. She has been assigned a mission: Win the annual motor race conducted by Germania and Japan’s finest youth across their conquered lands. To do this, Yael must disguise herself as the previous year’s victor, Adele Wolfe. If she wins as Adele, she’ll be granted access to the Victor’s Ball, where she will be guaranteed a dance with the reclusive Führer—her only chance to drive a knife through him.

The reaction to this novel was resoundingly positive. We started the evening off in praise of Graudin’s beautiful writing and solid world-building. For an alternate history novel, most found it easy to suspend disbelief and become fully immersed in the story. Graudin’s author note touched on the fact that the world presented in Wolf by Wolf could have been a reality, and most felt that Graudin made that world seem plausible.