This author grew up in Michigan, moved to Israel, changed her name, changed her life

On an isolated kibbutz in British Mandate Palestine – laboring under the hot sun and bathing in rationed water – 15-year-old Tonia dreams of living somewhere she will feel safe, and is determined to find her way to the United States. Then she meets Amos, a handsome and exotic young Yemenite, who fights in the resistance.

---

The Lonely Tree

As a student, Janet Lewis spent two summers in Israel. After graduation, she went back and changed her name to Yael Politis. She has lived all her adult life in Israel.

"I have worked as an agricultural worker, waitress, secretary, librarian, kitchen worker, Administrative Systems Analyst, English teacher, Hebrew–English translator, English editor, and Technical/Marketing Writer. My last (and longest-held) job was as a Proposal Writer for Israel Aerospace Industries."

Her sister, and seven generations of their family, inspire her fiction:

For some reason, it appears Amazon pulled my reviews of this author. So many Indie Authors have suffered the mystery of the vanishing 5-star reviews, but the everlasting 1-star bandits are allowed to pull down author rankings for the pettiest reasons.

Amazon keeps a gazillion one-star reviews complaining the book ended on a cliff-hanger. One star out of five for just that one complaint? The punishment doesn't fit the crime.

Book One of The Olivia Series was, and continues to be, FREE - so download it and see for yourself. If you like it and want more, you can buy Book Two. Is that so unethical of the author? It's standard practice, and book thieves, er, reviewers, shouldn't penalize so severely.

A few authors have a lot of bogus 5-star reviews,

the one sentence "I love it," and they're the ones that cause other authors to lose 5-star reviews. Never mind that reviews like mine include excerpts and evidence I really did read the book.

Oh, the old love-hate relationship with Amazon!

Luckily, I had posted two of the reviews at my blog:

Olivia, Mourning - The Olivia Series Book 1

What a beautifully written but heart-breaking story! From page one, I was hooked.

A boy named Mourning, orphaned as an infant, is adopted by a small-town white family. He grows up to be a sterling character, capable, hard-working, and reliable. What would the town do without him?

A girl named Olivia grows up in the same town, escaping the racist mindset that plagues everyone else except a lawyer who actually has Mourning’s best interests at heart, and a woman whose reputation is questionable, but whose character and integrity far surpass that of the self-righteous townfolk.

When Olivia wants to stake her claim to a piece of land her uncle left behind, she proposes something like a marriage of convenience between her and Mourning. She’s white, he’s black, so marriage is out of the question, and their arrangement is strictly platonic, until Olivia finally acknowledges her attraction to a man society will never allow her to marry. At times she must pretend to boss him around like a servant, when others are around, because the alternative is persecution of a worse sort.

The novel takes a dark turn, which can hardly be summarized with plot spoilers. The ending is a cliff hanger, sure to send readers racing for Book Two.

The prose is gorgeous, the historical setting is vividly reproduced with painstaking detail, and the characters are so real, it’s hard to believe they really are fictional. The fate of Olivia and Mourning, however, fulfills the double meaning of the title. Emotionally, it’s a brutal read. However, it’s all just the way the world is. And so the sequel is also aptly titled. I strongly recommend these novels for their social and historical value, but also for the sheer beauty of the story. Just be prepared to feel angry, horrified and heartbroken.

Book 2: The Way the World Is

“Olivia, Mourning” and its sequel, "The Way the World Is," comprise a beautifully written, haunting and unforgettable story of Olivia and the man she loves but cannot have because their world isn’t ready for mixed marriage. The tender and lovely relationship that builds in Book One is torn asunder due to the interventions of other people, who commit unthinkable evil while espousing obedience to the Bible, though it’s painfully obvious to everyone but themselves that they got religion all backward.

The sequel is a little slow to get going, but once it does, Olivia accomplishes great things, from acquiring a Bed and Breakfast to reuniting an emancipated slave with his wife, to risking her own life to help more slaves to freedom. The story is filled with danger and suspense, the horrors of slavery, the courage of those who sacrificed so much to end slavery at last.

And of course the story does show us what’s become of Mourning, the man Olivia loved and lost. Again, to say more risks too many spoilers, but the ending is at once heartbreaking and yet reassuring and uplifting. I wanted to fling the book against the wall, and yet the title is there to remind us: life is what it is. Yael Politis delivers with unsparing honesty a story that is believable and impossible to forget.

Book 3: Whatever Happened to Mourning Free?

She's back! Fans of Olivia, here is the answer to the question spelled out in the title.

SPOILER WARNING--if you haven't read "Olivia, Mourning" and "The Way The World Is," skip this paragraph - Readers of the first two books already know and love the brave woman who fell in love with a free black man in the 1840s, bore his child in secret and gave the baby up via a minister who arranged a sort of private adoption. Olivia runs a boarding house in Dearborn, Michigan, while risking her life to help slaves to safety via the Underground Railroad. At the end of Book Two, our parting image is Olivia seeing her baby from afar, in the arms of another woman who stands beside Mourning Free. Haunting!

A hundred-plus years later, the Civil War is history, slavery is a bad memory, but race relations are still an issue. The turbuluent 1960s are the setting as Charlene Connor revisits her great-great-great Aunt Olivia's diary. She always felt a connection to her distant aunt and wondered what happened in the years after the diary ended. A stranger at her door supplies the answer. He represents a young black boy, Charlie, who is apparently a direct descendant of Mourning Free.

To avoid plot spoilers, let's just say Charlene gets the sequel to that early diary. The novel segues into a third-person narrative of Olivia's story, as it happened, rather in the the form of a diary. Some critics have complained that this story should have been delivered "free standing" without the context of Charlene and Charlie in 1967, but I strongly disagree. The two sagas are inextricably bound to each other.

The genealogy fascinates me. Fans of Book One know how very nearly Olivia could have born the child of a rapist, rather than the son of the man she loved, but couldn't claim as a husband, race relations being what they were (and still are, even though to a lesser extent, today). We don't know if Mourning is alive or dead at the end of Book One or even if he's the father of Olivia's child. The horror of his possible death brings to mind a line from Richard Dawkins ("Unweaving the Rainbow"): "We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara ... because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."

It is stupefying that Charlie exists in 1967. He would not exist, if not for one brave white woman who dared to love a black man.

The final section of the novel shifts racial riots in 1960s Detroit, taking on the suspense of a thriller, yet keeping all the authenticity of historical fiction at its best. Yael Politis delivers a satisfying closer to a splendid trilogy. Be sure to read Books One and Two first.

Click here, then scroll down, to see the Beautiful Places Yael Has Called Home
Until next time,

Keangaroo

because Kean sounds like Kane (not keen, hint, hint)

@keangaroo at Discord
Find me at Twitter:
@tea_in_carolina
novelist, reviewer, editor, book critic Isle of Write~Steemit @PerihelionSF @NetGalley @AmazonVine
fan of indie authors & underdogs
Follow My Reviews at Goodreads
Find my Amazon Reviews
In-Depth Reviews, Author Highlights, History, Current Events, and more at My Wordpress Blog
Perihelion Science Fiction
NetGalley