In the course of the revision, I decided to move the book’s setting to Kraków, Poland, and I planned a research trip there. (When I was younger, I had lived in Kraków for several years. However, due to family constraints, I had not been there in nearly twenty years.) I booked that trip to depart on March 11, 2020—the very week the COVID-19 pandemic erupted and international travel was largely suspended. The cancellation turned out to be a good thing, because the day I was supposed to fly to Poland, I instead found myself hospitalized for an emergency appendectomy! I returned home from the hospital to find the world shut down and the COVID quarantine in full effect. Like so many of you, I had to adapt to a new normal: homeschooling three kids and teaching remotely, all the while finishing this book.

Despite all of this, The Woman with the Blue Star came to life. I did not set out to write a book that was relevant to the pandemic. (How could I have possibly known?) Yet I found in the process of writing this book that themes emerged of coping with isolation and an uncertain future, which were more relevant to our current world situation than I ever could have imagined.

As I sit here writing this to you in late August 2020, we are still under lockdown, with so many of the things we took for granted still gone. Though writing is solitary, I am a person who thrives on community. I miss our elementary school and the moms on the playground, my colleagues and students at Rutgers Law, the synagogue and the Jewish Community Center and the five libraries I patronize each week. I want to walk into my local independent bookstore and hug readers again.

Yet even with all of the hardships we’ve all experienced, so many bright lights endure like the stars in the night sky Sadie dreamed of seeing from her confinement in the sewer. Our community of readers and writers still flourishes. Despite the months apart from readers and book friends, I still feel you out there and I am grateful for the ways in which books have been a lifeline and how the writing community continues to support one another, the librarians and independent bookstores and booksellers who keep finding ways to get books into our hands, the bloggers and book influencers and sites who have recognized that writers and readers need to connect now more than ever, the tribe of writers who lift each other, the readers who never stop believing.

This book would not be possible without so many people. I am forever grateful to my “dream team”—my beloved agent, Susan Ginsburg, and my epic editor-who-is-more-like-a-coauthor, Erika Imranyi, for their passion and commitment to making this book the very best it could be. My deepest thanks also goes to my wonderful publicist, Emer Flounders, and the many talented people at Writers House and Park Row and Harlequin and HarperCollins. (Looking at you, Craig, Loriana, Heather, Amy, Randy, Natalie, Catherine and so many others!) My gratitude for their time and talent is always immense, and even more so as they persevere in these challenging and unprecedented times.