One More River Books in Order

The One More River books are young adult novels, but they tackle big questions without talking down to the reader. The first book follows Lesley, a Canadian teenager whose comfortable life is upended when her father decides the family should move to Israel and live more fully as Jews. Lesley does not greet the change with noble enthusiasm. She is angry, skeptical, and convinced she is being dragged away from everything that makes sense.

That resistance is what makes her such a good guide.

Once the family reaches the kibbutz, the series opens into a different kind of coming-of-age story. Lesley has to learn a new country, a new social world, and a new way of thinking about belonging. Banks uses school life, work, friendships, and family strain to show the everyday texture of that adjustment. She also places Lesley close to the larger conflict around her, including her uneasy, formative connection with an Arab boy across the River Jordan and the gathering pressure that leads toward war.

The sequel, Broken Bridge, moves the story forward through a younger generation. It brings in Canadian and Israeli teenagers, family history, and a shocking act of violence that ripples outward through a kibbutz community. The result is darker and more openly political, but it keeps the same concern with how public conflict settles inside private lives. Nobody in these books gets to stand outside history for long.

That is one reason the series still feels unusually sharp. Banks is interested in Israel as a lived place, not just a backdrop. Kibbutz life, migration, language, religion, divided loyalties, and the Israeli-Arab conflict all matter, but they matter because they shape the characters' emotional choices. The books are serious, sometimes painful, and full of arguments that do not resolve neatly.

These are not neat issue books with easy morals.

Readers should expect thoughtful, character-driven stories with real momentum and real bite. Read in order, the two books show how identity can shift across time and generations, and how a family's move, or a single violent moment, can change the course of several lives at once.