cover image Palace Beautiful

Palace Beautiful

Sarah DeFord Williams. Putnam, $16.99 (232pp) ISBN 978-0-399-25298-3

Soon after 13-year-old Sadie arrives with her family at their new home in 1985 Salt Lake City, she meets a ghost-obsessed girl who calls herself Bella, and discovers an attic nook named Palace Beautiful. Sadie loves painting and colors—especially naming them (chapters are titled “cave-dwelling white” and “spontaneous-combustion scarlet”). Sadie’s mother died giving birth to her younger sister, Zuzu, and Sadie harbors anger about that, as well as fear that her pregnant stepmother, Sherrie, may suffer a similar fate. Sadie, Bella, and Zuzu find a journal in Palace Beautiful written by Helen, a girl their age whose family was stricken with influenza in 1918, and whose fears parallel Sadie’s. Debut author Williams’s vivid prose brings both Sadie and Helen’s worlds to life, and narrator Sadie is a particularly—perhaps overly—precocious observer (“Dad found Sherrie a year and a half ago. She came from Neiman Marcus in Dallas. Dad saw her working at the makeup counter and they fell in love”). Through moments of heartache and joy, Sadie’s strong, contemplative spirit shines through, as does the thrill of discovering a secret place of one’s one. Ages 10–up. (Apr.)