There Is a Door in This Darkness

Gr 9 Up–A fortune teller sets up a card table outdoors in a snowy Harvard Square. It’s the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and business is slow. Relationships are also at a standstill: Wilhemina Hart’s meetup with friends Bee and Julie is brief because they all have additional family responsibilities now. It’s not the gap year between high school and college that Wilhemina anticipated. Compounding her isolation, she cannot get past the loss of her beloved Frankie, who died two years ago. Frankie and Esther were companions of her father’s great aunt Margaret. As a child Wilhemina observed this magical, elderly trio intuiting each other’s feelings from things left unsaid. But that closeness is gone now. When Wilhemina asks the fortune teller what will happen tomorrow, she sprouts wings and glitters with light, a hopeful sign that Bee and Julie don’t see. Wilhemina can’t believe it either until she meets cute-guy James Fang, who’s started seeing things too. That’s when the barrier she has constructed to protect herself begins to crack, and light comes in. Told over the span of two consequential presidential races, this fable’s mysterious happenings are skillfully interwoven with the results of the 2020 election, as Hart family members stay tuned until every vote is counted. But it’s Frankie who hovers over the novel, a visionary who believed in human hearts touching, and whose spirit lives in Wilhemina. There is diversity in the cast, including Julie, who is Black; Aunt Esther, who is Afro-Cuban and Jewish; and James, who is biracial. Wilhemina and other major characters are cued white.