The story takes place in 1944 and is about a friendship which develops between a Jewish New York boy and a refugee child from Nazi-occupied Paris.

[2] Set in 1944 New York City, the book is about a friendship that develops between twelve-year-old Alan Silverman and a French refugee of the Holocaust, Naomi.

She doesn't speak and hangs around in the stairwell of the apartment building, nervous, and compulsively tears paper into pieces.

[8] In the book Melancholia and Maturation Eric L. Tribunella describes the novel as "one of the starkest representations of trauma and traumatic loss".

[9] In the book The Jewish Holocaust the authors state, "There are many funny as well as serious moments as the girl (Naomi) recovers.