The Unexpected Lives of Ordinary Girls
by J. Anderson Coats
Middle School    Atheneum    272 pp.
9/25    9781665968614    $17.99

In 1910 small-town Colorado, Stanislava’s plan for getting out of her Slovene immigrant community—going by the “American name” of Sylvia, concealing her heritage to avoid discrimination, and one day going to college—comes to an abrupt halt when her older sister, Stina, runs away to get married. When their mother demands she stay home to do the never-ending housework in Stina’s stead, Stanislava/Sylvia runs away, too, ending up at the public library in Denver. One of the librarians recruits her to serve as translator for the library’s outreach to Denver’s Slovene community. As she helps to bridge the cultural gap, she meets women who show her that Slovenians are not all just like the ones she grew up with, allowing her to embrace both her Slovenian and American identities as she charts a course for herself. Anderson brings lots of threads together with skill, telling a cohesive story that has as much to say about the present—in terms of gender, ethnicity, race, religion, heritage, assimilation, classism, self-determination—as about its historical setting. Sylvia has an effective balance of naiveté and worldliness, making her an easy protagonist to root for, and her quest for independence is resolved in a gratifying but not overly neat way. This is historical fiction at its best, fusing period details with a compelling narrative and challenging assumptions of then and now.

From the November/December 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.