“Number the Stars” is particularly relevant to our family, and to this moment. The book’s title refers to Ellen’s Star of David necklace, which at one point Annemarie yanks from her neck, breaking the chain, to hide Ellen’s real identity. Annemarie also has a younger sister, Kirsti, and the Johansens and the Rosens live in the same apartment building. Part of the plan to deceive the Nazis involves Ellen posing as Annemarie’s older sister, Lise, who died a few years before the action of the book begins. Her best friend, Ellen Rosen, is Jewish, and Annemarie’s family helps Ellen’s family escape to Sweden during the German occupation of Denmark in World War II. “Number the Stars” is told from the perspective of a 10-year-old Danish girl named Annemarie Johansen in 1943. Finally, she told me she had started “Number the Stars” in school, and I was overjoyed: I remembered really liking Lois Lowry’s historical fiction when I was a girl, so it seemed like the perfect mother-daughter read. She kept trying to sell me on elves, but I demurred.

Frankweiler” on her, but she rejected it.

I tried pressing “From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. But I can’t get into the fantasy genre, so we cast around for a book we could both agree on. Her enthusiasm for reading is infectious and I suggested that maybe we should read something together and have a mini book club. I was overjoyed when this started happening with my older daughter - we started reading together and she’d chatter about the characters in the books that she was tearing through, like the telepathic elves in the “Keeper of the Lost Cities” series. Like many book nerds, when I became a mother I fantasized about a future in which my daughters and I could lounge side by side, reading in comfortable silence.

Number the stars cover