To & Fro is a remarkably unique book; it's two mirrored stories bound together, and can be read in either order, with each story "ending" in the middle. I started with "To," which features a young girl, Ani, who sets off on a journey, ostensibly following the Captain. The other story, "Fro," is about Annamae, a girl growing up with her mother and older brother Danny in Manhattan.

Serious Annamae has a deep interiority; she writes and draws constantly in a notebook she calls "Company," or Coco for short, from age 7 until about 12. This notebook seems to be the very one that Ani sets out to return to the Captain, along with his glasses; on Ani's journey, she brings an apricot-colored kitten, which she names Company, and she overhears a song - the lyrics of which are a poem Annamae wrote in her notebook.

More mirroring: Both Ani and Annamae each find a "ferryman": in Ani's case, a man who brings people across the river in a ferry, to Tewanfrough (to and fro); Annamae used to address letters to a "fairy man" but when she gets older, a bar and restaurant called the Ferryman opens on her street.

Both are fascinated with letters - "signs and wonders" - and study, after a fashion, the Torah and its commentary. To & Fro itself is full of signs and wonders, deep thinking, and a strong connection to what it's like to be a child, and begin growing out of childhood.

WaPo review: https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/05/21/to-fro-leah-hager-cohen-book/

Quotes from "To"

"No one's not broken in some way or other." (Cook to Ani, 22)

I like pretending objects are a kind of book. That they can be read. I like making up stories about them. Where they came from, whose hands used them, where they might be headed next. (52)

"A messenger doesn't have to understand the message. A messenger just has to receive it." (Ottla to Ani, 117)

Who can say what's beyond repair? (118)

[The notebook] had become like a song whose words I didn't know but whose tune I could hum. (147)

...and because I could not leave her, because maybe the old story didn't have to determine the new, because maybe I could invent a different story this time, I stayed. (155)

In a story riddled with holes, a single newfound scrap can have the power to recast the others. (158)

What I felt was, This has not happened to me only.
Maybe stories don't make things happen, but maybe through stories we find we are not alone. (170)

From "Fro"

"[A contranym] is a word with two opposite meanings." (Annamae's mom, 36)

"No two people can ever know the exact same thing!" (Annamae to her mom, 82)

"Questions of curiosity" vs. "questions of agenda" (98)

This was what Annamae had realized. No one could ever understand anybody. Not really.
They were all doomed.
Doomed not to understand one another.
Worse: doomed to go around thinking they were understanding one another, thinking they were being understood.
It was language's fault. People mistook language for solid ground, when really it was just a net. (119)

[The story of Akhnai's Oven, 166-167]

And yet she wondered...might it be possible to create something beyond your control? To imagine something into being that yet had a life of its own, an unruliness, an ability to disobey, perhaps to invent you in return? (183) ( )

Sorry to say, this was a dnf for me.

Thank you to LibraryThing, the author and the publisher.

This is the second book I've read that's flippable and I've come to enjoy them giving me a different perspective of this author's writing even though I've read a few of her books which were totally different in plot.

Doesn't matter if you start with To or Fro since it's two separate stories but I'm assuming the two come together? I decided to start with “To.” Ani seemed to be on her own on a farm run by the “Captain” who really wasn't one, with no one except the people who lived there who came and went. There was no mother but she mentioned her so there must have been previously and I'm wondering how she and/or her mother got there in the first place. It delved into when she and her mother were leaving their father's house who's wife lived there? No idea what that was about.

That said, I had no idea where “To” was going at page 64 and got bored so flipped it to “Fro.” Least this one was in the modern age with laptops, etc. It was about a girl Anamarie and her mother and her brother. She was a inquisitive child. Again, I felt this side of the book was just rambling on even though the chapters were short and I could read them quickly I decided not to finish this book.

This book was going nowhere for me. What a disappointment since I enjoyed her earlier novels that to me were “normal.” ( )

To & Fro is a strangely interesting book in two parts. One, marked "To", is narrated by Ani, who is about twelve years old as she goes on a sort of quest, searching for she is not sure what. The other part, "Fro", is told in third person about Annamae as she grows from about four years until she turns twelve. But the book promises "two beginnings with nary an end" and when the writing is finished we realize each girl knows she is just starting out.

I wondered if such a pair of stories could keep this 80 year old man interested, but 30 pages in into each tale, I was hooked by Cohen’s novel, and already looking up what else she has written.

Annamae lives in a three-story but modest apartment in New York City with her mother and older brother, in the current day.
Ani has lost her family and leaves her halfway housing in an unnamed land at a pre-modern time that sometimes sounds make-believe, and at other times is very real.

Both girls make up stories, have stories playing in their heads, sometimes recall what happened when they were younger, and sometimes are confused about their pasts. Both are bright, both are curious and independent. Their inner lives are as interesting as what happens to them in their worlds.

Slowly, things are told that connect one with the other in some sort of way, like a book, a necklace, a shared sense of longing.

For each, they never fall into danger. None of the things that books often tell about. Each is cared for and protected on their two different journeys by the people they meet, which is unusual for a contemporary book, but which in a way is refreshing and which serves each of their stories.

Since each story was as interesting as the other, I mostly read twenty pages or so of Ani, then flipped to Annamae, going back and forth until I could read the last few pages about each at the end. That was the most satisfying way for me to follow their stories. ( )

Maybe stories don’t make things happen, but maybe through stories we find we are not alone.
from To & Fro by Leah Hager Cohen

Ani follows a man off “to and fro,” a journey in which she encounters different groups and new insights. Her first journey took place after she and her mother were exiled from their home in the middle of winter, during which Ani’s mother died.

Ani has a brown book, although she cannot read. A kitten she calls Company that she struggles to keep alive. A scroll in a bottle on a necklace.

Life is walking and arriving and leave-taking, each a place of learning and growth, each a place of gift receiving.

Turn the book around, and there is another story.

The psychologist diagnosed Oppositional defiant disorder. The psychotherapist mentioned executive function disorder. The neuropsychologist proclaimed Annamae had a “stellar brain.”

Annamae thought differently, deeply, and it made her lonely. She knew people could never understand each other, that words failed, language was a net through which words spilled “like pennies through the holes.” She would not do her creative writing assignment and was posed to fail the class. No one saw what she saw, the deadly seriousness of one’s complete control over the characters one created. She saw that letters had colors and personalities, and she recognized the stories that Rav Harriet told about alef-bet and the creation of the world.

She had a brown notebook called Company in which she wrote and drew, but lost it. She had a message in a bottle necklace, but it disappeared.

Fantasy or reality, each story is mesmerizing, taking one into an unforgettable and unique character’s deepest thoughts as she journeys through life. When you are finished reading both, you will want to turn the book again and keep reading, realizing how much more there is to discover.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book. ( )