"It's been three days since the ship slowly pulled out of New York Harbor, since she watched her family get smaller and smaller. For one brief moment, she had held them in her palms before they disappeared." In Beyond That, the Sea by Laura Spence-Ash, Beatrix Thompson, 11 years old in 1940, arrives in a strangely idyllic America so different from her homeland across the Atlantic that it seems like an entirely different world. Her parents will continue living in London, waiting with bated breath for bombs to fall each night. Meanwhile, she is here, safe and sound on the East Coast but feeling utterly alone — that is, until she is collected by the Gregorys, the family with whom she has been assigned to live. Mr. Gregory is a schoolteacher; Mrs. Gregory is an effervescent, gregarious homemaker raising two boisterous boys: William, two years older than Beatrix, and Gerald, two years ...