Cambria Gordon, author of the young adult historical fiction novel, Trajectory (Scholastic Press, April 2, 2024) is a third generation Los Angeleno born into an assimilated Jewish family who had a Christmas tree every year. At age eleven, she told her parents she wanted to have a Bat Mitzvah like her other Jewish schoolmates. Cambria fell in love with Hebrew school—the songs, the prayers, the camping trips, the boys—got rid of the tree, and became a loud and proud Jew. Today, she writes stories about plucky Jewish girls who have the moxie to fight for what they believe in, even if at first they don’t always know the power they have inside.
The idea for Trajectory came from a little-known PBS video, Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII, about young women who manually computed ballistic calculations—trajectories of bombs and bullets—during World War II. Some of the women featured in the documentary were Jewish, sparking Cambria’s interest and the question, “What if an American Jewish mathematician was worried about her family in Poland and couldn’t do anything to help them?
That was the catalyst to create her protagonist, Eleanor, a shy, 17-year-old Jewish girl who won’t reveal her hidden math talent because of a family secret. Consumed with worry for her Jewish relatives in a Polish ghetto, Eleanor allows herself to be recruited by the US Army to serve in a covert math lab in Philadelphia. Soon, she’s entrusted with the ultimate challenge—to troubleshoot a top-secret weapon that will help lead America and the Allies to victory. But before she can solve this complicated problem, she must learn to unlock a bigger mystery: herself.
Cambria is also the author of The Poetry of Secrets and coauthor of the award-winning The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming, winner of the National Green Earth Book Award, a CCBC Choices selection translated into eleven languages.
Trajectory is a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection and an Indigo Books Heather’s Picks.