She encounters other ghosts as she walks the city streets, including Marguerite who teaches Pearl just what she is capable of in her ghostly form. Pearl remembers her family and knows she died during the flu epidemic, but why she has remained in Chicago and where she could be going to next are unclear. Thirteen Doorways also tells the story of Pearl, a ghost, who wanders in and out of the orphanage, serving as silent witness to Frankie’s travails, while also trying to piece together the mysteries of her own life. As the book open, the children are dealt a blow in the form of their father’s new wife and the decisions he makes about the life he intends to build with her. The nuns took them in and now, except for weekly visits from their father, the nuns control their lives.

Frankie’s mother is dead and her father, overcome with grief, has been unable to work and support his children.

All of them are hungry, all of them are cold, and, in various ways, many of them are abused by caregivers who have their own twisted ideas about who is deserving of compassion and who is not. There are 900 children in the orphanage, most of them dropped off temporarily by parents struggling through the Depression. In 1941 at the Chicago orphanage run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, 14-year-old Francesca, AKA “Frankie,” keeps an eye out for her younger sister Toni, struggles to stay in contact with her older brother Vito, who is housed in the boy’s section of the facility, and waits for her father to get himself back on his feet so they can be a family again. That one of the main characters is a ghost on a crash course with her own past just adds to the inherent drama that Ruby creates in this powerful and powerfully prescient historical novel. If literature exists to make us think, to broaden our minds, to make a difference, then there can be no better a book to read right now. Stop whatever you are reading right now and get your hands on a copy of Laura Ruby’s Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All.

13 doorways wolves behind them all