There’s a quiet kind of power in standing still and being seen.

When I first imagined the cover of The Second Coming of Grace, I didn’t have a detailed design in mind—I had a feeling. A young woman, grounded but questioning. The sky behind her shifting from light to shadow. A city that holds both beauty and burden. A cross in the distance. A Star of David around her neck. And a face that could have been mine.

Because in many ways, it is.

The figure on the cover is Grace Morgenstern, my protagonist—but she also looks a lot like I did when I was her age. That wasn’t something I planned. It just… happened. And when it did, I knew it was right.

Grace’s story is shaped by identity, visibility, and the longing to be accepted as she is—not as others want her to be. That’s been my story, too, in quieter ways. I grew up fielding questions like “What’s your ethnicity?” from well-meaning people who didn’t quite know where to place me. I always answered, “Canadian,” in all seriousness, which usually earned a polite laugh. At the time, I didn’t know my mother’s full story—she was adopted and only later found her birth family. So for most of my life, “Canadian” was the only honest answer I had.

This cover brings all of that into the light. Grace stands in front of the Toronto skyline—my old home, her current one. The CN Tower is unmistakable. So is the Christian cross in the far background, barely visible but undeniably there. Between them, Grace stands at the meeting point of many stories: Jewish, Christian, ancestral, modern, spiritual, embodied. She’s both part of the world and set apart from it, caught in a moment of quiet clarity before everything changes.

The palette—purples, oranges, warm dusky light—evokes that in-between time just before night falls or just before dawn breaks. That’s where Grace lives in this story. That’s where transformation begins.

This is the image I carried with me as I wrote. And now, it’s the one I offer to you.

I hope it draws you in gently and gives you pause.

I hope it makes you feel seen.