What the Night Sings

by Vesper Stamper

Overview

A Morris Award Finalist
Longlisted for the National Book Award

For fans of The Book Thief and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas comes a lushly illustrated novel about a teen Holocaust survivor who must come to terms with who she is and how to rebuild her life.

"A tour de force. This powerful story of love, loss, and survival is not to be missed." —KRISTIN HANNAH, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale

After losing her family and everything she knew in the Nazi concentration camps, Gerta is finally liberated, only to find herself completely alone. Without her papa, her music, or even her true identity, she must move past the task of surviving and on to living her life. In the displaced persons camp where she is staying, Gerta meets Lev, a fellow teen survivor who she just might be falling for, despite her feelings for someone else. With a newfound Jewish identity she never knew she had, and a return to the life of music she thought she lost forever, Gerta must choose how to build a new future.

"What the Night Sings is a book from the heart, of the heart, and to the heart. Vesper Stamper's Gerta will stay with you long after you turn the last page. Her story is one of hope and redemption and life—a blessing to the world." —Deborah Heiligman, award-winning author of Charles and Emma and Vincent and Theo

A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST CHILDREN'S BOOK OF 2018
A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF 2018

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781524700386
Publisher:	Random House Children's Books
Publication date:	02/20/2018
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	485,651
Product dimensions:	7.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

About the Author

Vesper Stamper is an author/illustrator living in the Northeast with her husband, filmmaker Ben Stamper and her two children. She has an MFA in Illustration as Visual Essay from School of Visual Arts, NYC. Follow her on Instagram and Facebook @vesperillustration, and learn more at vesperillustration.com.

Read an Excerpt

I am lying next to Rivkah in the bunk when the announcement comes. She is burning; she is freezing. I hold her, and I sing to her:
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "What the Night Sings"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Vesper Stamper.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Children's Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

★ 11/20/2017
Stamper’s exceptionally moving debut goes beyond recounting the suffering inflicted on Jews during the Holocaust to explore a young woman’s conflict between love and artistic ambition. Fourteen-year-old Gerta Richter, a talented singer and daughter of a violist in the Würzburg Orchestra, learned that she is actually Gerta Rausch, a Jew, when she and her father were forcibly removed from Würzburg by the Nazis one night in June 1944. The novel opens with the British liberation of German concentration camps in 1945 and moves smoothly among Gerta’s prewar life, her stay in concentration camps and the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons camp, and her postwar flight to Palestine. Focusing on Gerta’s transitional time as a displaced person, Stamper delves into her fight to regain her musical gift, her deepening relationship with a fellow survivor, her growing identity as a Jew, and her struggle to make decisions about her future. Generously illustrated with Stamper’s haunting spot images and larger scenes, all in deep brown hues that evoke profound emotion, the book is a strong addition to the bookshelf of Holocaust fiction. Ages 12–up. Agent: Lori Kilkelly, Rodeen Literary Management. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 02/01/2018
Gr 7 Up—Fifteen-year-old Gerta Rausch did not know she was Jewish until the day she was picked up by the Nazis and taken to a concentration camp. She lived in Germany with her musician father and was sheltered from the reality outside her home, spending all of her time training in viola and opera. Gerta's father reveals the truth as they are crammed into a train car. Gerta struggles to accept this news; she knows nothing of Jewish traditions and her only experience with her religion is tied up with hatred, abuse, and slaughter. Being allowed to play in orchestras keeps her alive in both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Although the narrative describes life before liberation, much of it focuses on the postwar experience: life in concentration camps—turned—"displaced persons camps," lingering hostility toward Jews, as well as the grueling journey many Jews made from Europe to Palestine. The illustration style and muted color palette work beautifully with the text, managing to communicate both despair and hope. The narrative is spare but powerful as it depicts the daily horrors of the camps and the struggle to survive, hold on to humanity and, once freed, understand how to live again. VERDICT This powerful story is an excellent choice for any library.—Carla Riemer, Claremont Middle School, Oakland

School Library Journal

★ 2017-10-28
Gerta didn't know she was Jewish until she and her father were taken for transport by the Nazis.When Bergen-Belsen is liberated, Gerta and the other survivors are ill, skeletal, dying, or sunk in madness, and they have no homes to which they can return. Relating the events that led her there, she tells of a seemingly carefree life in Würzburg with her musician father and German gentile stepmother, an opera singer who is also Gerta's voice teacher. But they were living with false identification papers, and their lives become ever more withdrawn. She has fleeting visions of her early childhood in Köln, of her mother, and of Kristallnacht. The cattle-car journey to Theresienstadt is only the beginning of days, weeks, months, years filled with unspeakable horrors in the "intricacies of the Nazi web…the animalization of human souls." Then comes Auschwitz, where her father is gassed, then Bergen-Belsen, typhus, and, finally, a kind of awakening to her own humanity. Later she covertly enters British-occupied Palestine, Eratz Yisrael, and builds a life there. Stamper spares readers nothing. Everything that Gerta witnesses or experiences really happened in the hell that was the Holocaust, including the further humiliations in its aftermath, a rarely told part of the story. The text is on pale, sepia-toned paper with dark, eerie illustrations in the same tones, reminiscent of real drawings produced by camp inmates.Evil that is impossibly difficult to comprehend and filled with word-images that will leave readers gasping. The author's dedication says it all, in both Hebrew and English: "Remember." (author's note, map, glossary, resources, acknowledgments; not seen) (Historical fiction. 14-adult)

Kirkus Reviews

"...will leave readers gasping."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Generously illustrated with Stamper’s haunting spot images and larger scenes, all in deep brown hues that evoke profound emotion, the book is a strong addition to the bookshelf of Holocaust fiction."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"The narrative is spare but powerful as it depicts the daily horrors of the camps and the struggle to survive, hold on to humanity and, once freed, understand how to live again."—School Library Journal, starred review

From the Publisher

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