ACROSS SO MANY SEAS

Four girls. One Sephardic Jewish family. Five centuries. Ruth Behar's novel moves between 1492 Spain, 1920s Turkey, 1960s Cuba, and present-day Miami, following a different girl from the same bloodline in each era, all of them connected by the Ladino language their family carries across every move and by the fact that each is fleeing something, whether the Spanish Inquisition or a political revolution centuries later. Told in hardcover for ages 10 to 14, it's a Newbery Honor book, and the structure means a reader gets one continuous family story told across four distinct historical settings rather than a single girl's timeline.

Moving between four narrators and four eras is an ambitious structure for a middle-grade novel, and what it buys is a sense of history as something that happened to actual relatives rather than a timeline in a textbook - the same family surviving expulsion, migration, and exile generation after generation. Where the book earns its keep is in making that history feel personal rather than abstract - a natural opening for a family's own conversation about what gets carried forward across a move: language, traditions, memory, whatever survives when everything else has to be left behind.