THE RIBBON LEAF

Growing up together in a small German town, Edie and Sabine are the best of friends.

As Hitler rises to power, things worsen for Edie, who is Jewish. She flees to Montreal with her mother after Kristallnacht, leaving behind her father and a heartbroken Sabine, whose own family is splintered by their different feelings about and involvement in Nazism. As the girls grow, their individual circumstances and the horrors of the world become terribly real, and each must make choices about who they will be and how they will live in dangerous times. While the goals of the story are worthy of respect, the relationships and plot points come across as heavy-handed and didactic rather than organic and dynamic. The narrative voices of the two protagonists often blend together despite their disparate experiences. Edie and Sabine are vessels for a narrative that tries to pull on readers’ heartstrings while lacking the complexity and depth of feeling this time in history deserves. It’s noteworthy that the details of Sabine’s German cultural milieu feel more fully realized than Edie’s Jewish heritage, which is touched on relatively lightly, often in moments that make a wider point about antisemitism rather than highlighting other aspects of Jewish life. This righteous gentile meets star-crossed friendship parable is a familiar tale that has been executed more effectively many times before.

Well-meaning but does not add much to well-explored territory.