Our score
Outstanding
Keeper of Lost Children
Sadeqa Johnson's Keeper of Lost Children is historical fiction that follows a schoolgirl in Maryland, an officer's wife in occupied Germany, and a soldier from Philadelphia as their lives converge around the mixed-race children abandoned after World War II.
From the review
Sophia Clark wants out of her parents' house, and in 1965 she gets her way: a spot at an elite Maryland boarding school where every other student is white. Then she finds a secret there, and it sends her hunting for an answer to a question she hadn't known to ask. Who is she, and who decided not to tell her? Sadeqa Johnson, who wrote The House of Eve, builds her answer in Keeper of Lost Children by going back in time and across an ocean. Back there is postwar occupied Germany, where Ethel Gathers, married to an American officer and proud of it, discovers an orphanage full of abandoned mixed-race children, born to German women and Black American GIs. She decides they will have homes, and the novel follows her as she sets about it. Alongside her is Ozzie Phillips, a Philadelphia man who joined the army in 1948, right after it desegregated, eager to make something of himself. In Manheim he meets a local woman named Jelka, and what starts between them reaches a long way down the years.
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