Ask a Bookseller: ‘Tree. Table. Book.‘ by Lois Lowry

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now. 

In honor of the start of school, Ask a Bookseller is focused on recommendations for kids and teens — although Kristin Nilsen of Big Hill Books in Minneapolis recommends this middle-grade read for everybody.

It’s the newest title from Lois Lowry, called “Tree. Table. Book.” You might know Lowry for her novels “Number the Stars” and “The Giver,” which won Newbery Medals in 1990 and 1994, respectively. Now age 87, Lowry has written a new book that Kristin says deserves to be in Newbery contention.

The story follows two Sophies who live on the same street and are friends. Narrator Sophie is 11 years old. Her friend “big Sophie” is 88. Young Sophie begins to hear the grown-ups in her life expressing concerns that big Sophie is no longer able to live on her own. They want her to have a cognition test, to ascertain whether she has dementia.

Young Sophie is determined to keep her friend in her home, and so sets about helping big Sophie study for the cognition test. In the test, a person must remember and repeat a series of three words. (The title “Tree. Table. Book.” comes from this test.)

Over the course of their studies, big Sophie begins telling her friend stories of when she was a little girl growing up in Poland at the start of WWII when the Nazis came. These are stories she’d never told anyone before, not even members of her own family.