Strange Beauty

Emily Walters Gregor is a graduate student in 20th-century American
literature and an ESL writing tutor at the University of Minnesota.

Fifteen-year-old Penelope sometimes feels like her grandmother
understands her better than anyone else—even better than her best
friends who have recently started to care more about boys and their
weight than having fun. So when Penelope is assigned a school project to
uncover a family secret, she naturally turns to her grandmother for a
good story. Her grandmother brings her to the neighbourhood in Old
Montreal where she grew up. Suddenly, Penelope sees the old Roma woman
who lives down the street—whom she and her friends taunted and called
“the Queen of Sheba”—in a whole new light.

When her grandmother suffers a fatal stroke, Penelope delves even
deeper into the story of her grandmother’s childhood and the
neighbourhood full of friends she accumulated. What she finds is a
strange beauty in people and places where she’d never thought to look.

In addition to its engaging and touching prose, Strange Beauty is
notable because of its attention to areas often overlooked in
young-adult novels—deep relationships with older adults and family
members, and compassion and attentiveness to neighbours and friends.
Highly recommended.