Content Warning: This novel discusses the Holocaust, suicide, war, and violent war crimes.

In 1938 Berlin, a 12-year-old Jewish boy named Josef is awakened by the sound of Hitler’s Brownshirts breaking into his family’s apartment. They have come to arrest Josef’s father: “Other Jewish homes and businesses and synagogues were destroyed all over Germany, and tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. They called it Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass” (5). Six months later, Josef’s father is released from a concentration camp, Dachau, on the condition that he and his family leave the country: “The Landau family wasn’t going to wait around to see what the Nazis would do next” (6).

Eleven-year-old Isabel is struggling to survive in Castro’s Cuba during 1994. Without the support of the Soviet Union, the economy is floundering, and people are starving. Isabel tags along with her father and grandfather when they go to Havana to collect the family’s food rations. She brings her trumpet, hoping to earn a little money as a street musician: “She listened now, intently, trying to hear the heartbeat of Cuba in her own music. What she heard instead was the sound of breaking glass” (11).