The James Logan Courier

By Alana Semuels
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

Young adult novelists are increasingly tackling darker subjects: kidnappings, drugs, rape. But few have delved into so many dark subjects as novelist Thane Rosenbaum, who ventures into YA territory with his latest, "The Stranger Within Sarah Stein," a novel revolving around divorce, Sept. 11, homelessness and the Holocaust.

What might be most odd about this combination of subjects is that the book isn't glum at all. Told through the eyes of the perky, bike-riding 12-year-old Sarah Stein, the daughter of a candy-making mother and an artist-painter father, it works as more of a fantasy than as a dark rumination on tragedy. There is sadness between the lines, but also a bright fairy-tale aspect, a kind of "Willy Wonka" meets "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close."

From wikipedia:
Emmett Williams (4 April 1925 – 14 February 2007) was an American poet and visual artist.

Williams was born in Greenville, South Carolina, and grew up in Virginia, and lived in Europe from 1949 to 1966. Williams studied poetry with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College, studied anthropology at the University of Paris, and worked as an assistant to the ethnologist Paul Radin in Switzerland.

Visit Emmett-Williams.com.