As Slater’s story opens, the Siegel family has moved several times in Germany, first to Weiler in 1938, then to the smaller town of Gemeinde in 1939, and finally to minuscule Ortschaft in the summer of 1940. Ortschaft, a town of only 10,000 residents, still seems amicable enough to its 200 Jewish inhabitants. Young Sophie Siegel may be hopeful, but readers know what’s coming. The restrictions and brutality increase even in Ortschaft until the horrifying day when Sophie, hiding in a closet, watches through a crack as Nazis kill her parents. Then she makes a shocking discovery: When those same Nazis search her closet, they don’t see her. She has become invisible. She’s still stranded in Nazi Germany, but now she’s able to watch unimpeded—and to do her best to foment resistance (including the outlandish hope of creating a gigantic golem to defend the Jews). Using this subtle, startling blend of historical fiction and richly imagined fantasy, Slater manages to craft that rarest of things: a Holocaust novel that feels new. The author has a keen eye for the small, true details of everyday life. The creeping, incremental degradations of Nazi Germany are portrayed with a dramatic immediacy often missing from history books. Slater is also very skilled at creating tense moments arising from Sophie’s invisibility. At one point, she’s standing in the middle of a room that’s being vigorously searched by Nazi soldiers: “For a long and terrifying few seconds, the redhead stood directly in front of Sophie, who was too cold and too scared to do anything but shake. If he had taken just one more step, he would have kicked her.”