Safe Harbors

Roth-Hano continues the autobiographical story begun in Touch Wood , her delicate evocation of her childhood as a Jew in wartime France, when she and her younger sisters found a haven among Catholic nuns in Normandy. Safe Harbors meets up with Renee in 1951, when, at 19, she has just arrived in New York City, an au pair for a family of assimilated Jews. In adjusting to her new environment, Renee must continue to confront the legacies of the war and of the intervening years--she grapples with religious identity, including the solace she has learned to find in Catholicism; with uncertain faith in God; with grief and guilt over her father's peacetime death; with her shock at the losses of war. Renee's divided attentions strain the narrative: arranged in the form of a journal, passages frequently read like unmediated diary entries, their artlessness obscuring the poignancy of the author's observations and their introspection endowing only Renee with full dimensions. More ambitious than Touch Wood in its attempt to shift among various chronological settings, this sequel, paradoxically, succeeds on a smaller scale. Ages 12-up. (Oct.)