Conquer the Darkness

When Renie Greenberg put down the telephone, she was still in a daze. Her immediate thought was that the cheerful clutter of her children's toys would have to be removed from the floor. First reactions are always superficial, so practical. But then she drifted back to her world of a decade before, when she and her friends were thirteen and their world was carefree, except for the typical catastrophes of teen-age life: tests, homework, rivals for the love of best friends. There was a mysterious teacher and a national contest. All the things that make a Bais Yaakov girlhood a marvelous experience. Then a genuine tragedy struck, in the form of a sudden accident and a seriously injured best friend. A world of make believe had become numbingly true, and the last page might not have a happy ending. Renie and the others had to grow up and grope with a tangle of hope and despair, of failure and triumph, of accepting and conquering an unexpected reality, of closeness and separation. The experience had faded with the years, and now the unexpected phone call had brought it back. In this very fine first novel, we relive it with Renie and her friends. Estie Florans has woven together suspense, warmth, humor, courage. She develops her characters; we know them; we laugh and thrill with them; and when we learn who was on the other end of Renie's phone call, we share her tense expectancy as she waits for the door to open to her past. This is a delightful book for young women of all ages.
by Estie Florans