This is a touching story that starts with a day that is not like the others. Eleven-year-old Sophie Winslow is best friends with her neighbor, eighty-eight-year-old Sophie Gershowitz. Eleven-year-old Sophie is an unusual child - she's an old soul and hypochondriac. She loves using traditional library reference tools such as looking up medical ailments in the Merck Manual and memorizing quotes from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. As a working librarian, I felt a pang of joy and grief reading about this. I'm not sure how much either of those resources are used anymore but there was a time in my career when they were so popular they were considered "Ready Reference." That a kid would use them paints a very specific picture in my mind.
The day that is not like the others is the day when young Sophie realizes that her best friend is forgetting important things such as leaving her teakettle unattended on a hot stove. Or what day of the week it is. Sophie worries that elder Sophie's son will move her into an assisted living facility, or worse, take her to Akron with him. So, young Sophie develops a cognitive test to prove that elder Sophie should stay in her own home.
It turns out that when a person is eighty-eight, they may forget some things and remember other things. The things remembered may have been suppressed for a lifetime. The stories that Sophie Gershowitz reveals during the test are significant in many ways. They are stories she has never shared with anyone before. And they refer to a time and place that was life-changing in catastrophic and heartbreaking ways. What starts with a day that is not like the others culminates in a story of friendship, caring, understanding and acceptance.