Briefly noted in The New Yorker (July 29 issue): “Holt’s beguiling début reimagines the story of Samantha Smith, the ten-year-old American girl who, in 1983, started a correspondence with the Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov. In Holt’s novel, the Smith character, named Jennifer Jones, moves into a house across the street from the book’s narrator, Sarah Zuckerman. The two girls form an intense friendship that unravels when Jenny rises to celebrity after her letter to Andropov is published in Pravda. Jenny tours the Soviet Union as a good-will ambassador and then dies in a plane crash with her family. A decade later, Sarah travels to Yeltsin-era Moscow (sharply evoked as ‘a place of new money and ancient grudges’) to retrace her lost friend’s footsteps and investigate the possibility that Jenny may still be alive. Holt’s book, in which there is no difference between personal and political betrayal, vividly conjures the anxieties of the Cold War without ever lapsing into nostalgia.”