What I Left for You

September 30, 2024
A woman’s wartime vow reverberates across generations in the gripping third installment of Tolsma’s Echoes of the Past series (after What I Promise You). In 1940s Poland, university lecturer Helena promises a Jewish colleague, who is dying in the Krakow ghetto, that she’ll find and care for the woman’s infant daughter, Teena. Helena and her husband, Jerzy, rescue Teena from an orphanage and grow to love the baby, but when the couple is caught aiding partisan efforts against the Nazis, Jerzy’s shot and Helena’s sent to a forced labor factory in Germany, never to see Teena again. In a parallel narrative set in present-day Pittsburgh, social worker McKenna Muir—Helena’s great-granddaughter—is reeling from a failed engagement and decides to take a sabbatical to research her ancestry in Poland. When McKenna’s grandmother—the daughter Helena had after the war—asks her to locate Teena, the adopted sister she never knew, McKenna embarks on a globe-spanning search that leads to the discovery of more than one buried family secret. Tolsma vividly brings her protagonists to life as Helena and McKenna draw on their faith to find hope amid suffering (“What good the prayers did, I had no idea,” Helena muses at one point. “But even if God refused to listen, refused to answer, they gave me some peace”). Readers won’t be able to turn the pages fast enough.