For Kerza Freiborne, the war began with fire and ended in ice. But Ally bombs and a march through frozen fields did not come first: the war had a precursor that brought it to her doorstep in the shape of hunched shoulders, dirt-smudged cheeks and a gold star sewn to the breast of a sweater. A fugitive Jew in the heart of Nazi Germany is not a thing that can be simply swept beneath a rug, and thusly, it is the attic of Kerza's family in which the traumatized, stammering boy must take shelter. With the battlefield drawing closer and a country's old prejudice reaching a boiling point, the line between us and them is blurred and the duplicity of human nature becomes clearer every day. But for better or worse, this Jew and German are the most important people in each others lives, and everything they thought they understood of their world will soon change forever.

When Shiloh Tucker was born, his life expectancy was that of any other child, until he was diagnosed with a congenial heart defect as an infant. But after seventeen years of being told he would die, Shiloh Tucker is very much alive, with one little catch: after his heart failed him in infancy, his brain lost too much oxygen in the occipital lobe. So in short, he's certainly kicking, but he has been legally blind since his fourth week of life. Compromise. That’s what life’s about, isn’t it? Shiloh doesn't see it that way- he doesn't like it one bit. But his lack of sight certainly never held him back from a good fistfight, and three expulsions and a broken nose later, Shiloh Tucker is being sent to live with his estranged father's relatives in Nantucket, Massachusetts, where he just might find that there's more to sight than simply seeing.