41 and a single professor, Sara Leader decides to adopt a child. In the process of creating a new family, she reluctantly begins to probe her father's secret history - in particular, his flight as a 17-year-old refugee from the Holocaust aboard a ship denied entry in America. Alternating between a teenage boy's energetic letters to Eleanor Roosevelt and a daughter's sifting through the fragments of her father's traumatic wartime choices, Victoria Redel imbues her characters not only with bravery but with the imagination needed to survive the past.