Holt perfectly melds the personal and the political in this spot-on portrait of a girlhood friendship set against a Cold War backdrop. Sad 10-year-old Sarah Zuckerman, whose older sister has died and whose father has abandoned the family, finds great comfort in her friendship with Jennifer Jones, who lives across the street in their wealthy D.C. neighborhood. Then Jennifer becomes a media sensation when a letter she writes to Yuri Andropov asking for peace is made public. Sarah once again feels the sting of abandonment, and when Jennifer's family is ultimately killed in a plane crash, their friendship seems like a distant memory. Ten years later, upon graduating from college, Sarah receives a mysterious e-mail hinting that Jennifer might still be alive. She heads to Moscow and an internship, determined to find out the truth. Holt ably captures both the paranoia of the Cold War and the shabby yet genteel aura of an exhausted Moscow just after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. But it is her razor-sharp insights into the turbulent dynamics of female friendship that give this novel its heft.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist

Two kids living comfortably in Washington, DC, in the 1990s are best friends, though Sarah is shy and withdrawn while Jenny Jones is a Breck girl, sassy and pert. On a lark, they write to Yuri Andropov, the Soviet head of state, asking for world peace. He responds but only to Jenny, inviting her to the USSR. Jenny vaults to media stardom. The girls draw apart, but life goes on-until the Jones family perishes in a plane crash. Years later, in an offer to share memories, a Russian friend of Jenny's invites Sarah to visit. Sarah, with several painful defections already behind her, learns in boomtown Moscow that the Soviet propaganda coup had dark consequences for the Jones family. VERDICT Holt, once a copywriter and now an award-winning fiction author, evokes with perfect clarity the sparkling tones of friendship and the hollow clangs of betrayal. Holt's Cold War plot and setting make a fertile medium for growing the suspicion that loyalty is but love's plaything. This debut novel delivers a satisfying and mature narrative for all readers and may have a special resonance for young adults. [See Prepub Alert, 12/7/12.]-Barbara -Conaty, Falls Church, VA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

"THE first defector was my sister." So begins Elliott Holt's first novel, "You Are One of Them," and don't you want to keep reading? This book, inspired by the story of Samantha Smith, the American schoolgirl who wrote to the Soviet premier Yuri Andropov in 1982, and asked if he intended to start a nuclear war, has the momentum of a mystery but is, more essentially, a consideration of how we are haunted by loss. The narrator, Sarah Zuckerman, thinks of defection not just in the sense of leaving one's country for its enemy but also as a metaphor for abandonment. Her sister, who dies at age 4, is a defector, and her father, who divorces her mother and returns to his native England, is another. So too is her mother, who vanishes into debilitating anxiety and an obsession with nuclear disarmament. Defection provides the novel with a thematic framework, but Sarah's fixation on it also works as a neat piece of subtle, cumulative characterization, revealing her tendency toward martyrdom: by dying, divorcing or struggling with unhappiness, her loved ones betray her. Sarah's major unresolved loss is that of her childhood best friend, Jennifer Jones. In 1982, Sarah and Jennifer, 10-year-olds in Washington, write letters to Andropov asking him for peace. The letters are Sarah's idea, but only Jennifer receives a response from Andropov - and an invitation to visit the Soviet Union and see for herself that the Russian people don't want a war. Jennifer becomes a media sensation, and her friendship with Sarah deteriorates. Two years later, Jennifer and her parents are killed in a plane crash over the ocean. Their remains are never found. In 1995, nearing her college graduation, Sarah receives a letter from a Russian girl named Svetlana, whom Jennifer met on her trip. Svetlana hints that all is not as it seems, asking: "How do you know Jennifer Jones is dead? Because you saw on the television? You must also believe that your American cosmonauts walked on moon!" Svetlana promises a "special tour" of Moscow, and Sarah, tantalized, buys a plane ticket. Holt's descriptions of Moscow in the mid-1990s are fascinating, slyly funny and full of melancholy details: a frozen drunk covered with icicles on a bench; a neverflown space shuttle on display in Gorky Park; young prostitutes lined up in an underpass, waiting to be chosen. "Moscow was a furtive city," Sarah observes. "People were as closed and guarded as fists." I could have spent longer with Holt's prose, following Sarah down Moscow's cold streets and through its sweaty discos. And I would have liked the plot to have meandered away from the question of whether Jennifer is dead, especially since the book's rushed final quarter doesn't quite hold together. In her quest for answers, Sarah behaves obtusely - for example, while trying to avoid making another character suspicious, she pesters him with blatantly suspicion-arousing questions - but doesn't seem to face any consequences. It's as if the novel hasn't committed to the rules of its own cloak-and-dagger puzzle. Holt might have been uncomfortable with an alive-or-dead dichotomy, but in her effort to create satisfying ambiguity, both possibilities come to seem equally unlikely instead of equally plausible. The main thing, though, is that "You Are One of Them" is a hugely absorbing first novel from a writer with a fluid, vivid style and a rare knack for balancing the pleasure of entertainment with the deeper gratification of insight. More, please. Maggie Shipstead is the author of "Seating Arrangements."

A novel that tells the story of best friends who grow up in D.C. during the Cold War, told from the perspective of the one who is less talented, less desirable and more real. Holt's short fiction has received a Pushcart Prize, and she was runner-up for the 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award. Our narrator and protagonist is Sarah Zuckerman. After Sarah's older sister's death from meningitis, her parents' marriage never recovers. Sarah needs a friend, and when the Joneses move in next door, she gets her wish. Jenny Jones' family is an advertisement for a particular form of American domestic happiness, and the outgoing Jenny is an advertisement for herself. It is the early '80s, the deepest chill of the Cold War, when Sarah begins a letter to Yuri Andropov, then leader of the Evil Empire. Jenny writes too, and Andropov replies to her. Jenny becomes a media darling, joins the popular clique at school, and leaves Sarah and her morose mother alone with their sorrows. A few years later, Jenny and her parents die in a plane crash. This fact of Jenny's disappearance, and the conspiracies surrounding it, define Sarah's life (Sarah's mother establishes a Jenny Jones foundation). After college, Sarah travels to Russia in response to a note from Svetlana. Svetlana, apparently, is the girl standing next to Jenny in all the photos from Jenny's visit as a child ambassador to the USSR. We never stray far from Sarah's cramped perspective, and this tries the reader's patience, as Sarah offers platitudes in place of insight. This debut novel only looks deeply at one character, Sarah, and she is not enough to sustain interest.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Fresh from college, adrift Washington, D.C., native Sarah Zuckerman heads to post-Cold War Moscow in search of clues about what happened to Jenny Jones, her childhood best friend. After she wrote a letter to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov asking for peace in 1982, when the girls were 10, Jenny was invited to the U.S.S.R. as a "peace ambassador" and became an international sensation. But three years later, she and her parents were killed in a plane crash-or so it seemed. In 1995, Sarah receives a letter from a Russian woman named Svetlana, who hints that Jenny might be alive. But once in drab, polluted Moscow, a "place of new money and ancient grudges," Sarah worries that she's being lied to and manipulated. Holt creates strong roots, both in 1980s America-with references to friendship pins, Casey Kasem, and the ever-persistent threat of nuclear war-and 1990s Moscow, where tracksuits and cigarettes are never far away. Telling details of Soviet oppression and Russia's budding advertising industry paint a vivid portrait of a country testing the waters of democracy. Holt, who won a Pushcart Prize for her short fiction, writes with a pleasing, wry intelligence in this promising debut. Agent: Bill Clegg, WME Entertainment. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.