Book #152 of 2019: Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro Dani Shapiro writes movingly of her sense of identity being upended by an unexpected DNA test result, but I struggle to truly comprehend her viewpoint. Even setting aside the author’s odd trust in mediums, meditation gurus, and personality tests, it …
Tag Archives: Judaism
Book Review: Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope
Book #140 of 2019: Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope I appreciate this novel’s Israeli kibbutz setting — and debut author Jessamyn Hope’s inclusion of so many non-religious aspects of Jewish life there — but I find the characters to be a uniformly miserable bunch. It’s hard to root for any of them to do anything but …
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Book Review: Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster by Jonathan Auxier
Book #123 of 2019: Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster by Jonathan Auxier For the most part, this is a really lovely look at a young chimney sweep in Victorian London and her friendship with a magical soot creature who comes to life and becomes her protector. It captures the feeling of …
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Book Review: The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman
Book #104 of 2019: The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman An elegant and immersive feat of first-century storytelling, culminating in the mytho-historic slaughter at Masada where Jewish resistance fighters reportedly killed themselves rather than falling to their Roman besiegers. That’s a difficult topic for any writer to approach, but Alice Hoffman paints it as a proper …
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Book Review: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
Book #94 of 2019: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal (Lady Astronaut #1) I really like this alternate history novel, in which a natural disaster in 1952 accelerates the timeline of space travel and a female pilot and mathematician struggles to break the glass ceiling of the new rocket program. The first quarter or …
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Book Review: A Guide for the Perplexed by Dara Horn
Book #81 of 2019: A Guide for the Perplexed by Dara Horn This is a weird book, and although I enjoy some of the individual strands, I ultimately don’t feel like they add up to a satisfactory whole. The main plot is a loose retelling of Joseph’s slavery from Genesis, split between a tech genius …
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Book Review: The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
Book #62 of 2019: The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow If not a Great American Novel, this winner of the 1954 National Book Award for Fiction at least feels like an attempt at a Great American Picaresque, following a charming young Jewish ruffian around Depression-era Chicago and his subsequent wanderings away from responsibility. …
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Book Review: The Sisters of the Winter Wood by Rena Rossner
Book #58 of 2019: The Sisters of the Winter Wood by Rena Rossner This tale of two Jewish girls discovering their magical heritage in early 20th-century Moldova is a messy debut novel, and I wish it had better integration of its various parts. It’s both a retelling of the Christina Rossetti poem “Goblin Market” (far …
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Book Review: What the Night Sings by Vesper Stamper
Book #55 of 2019: What the Night Sings by Vesper Stamper Middle-grade fiction is sometimes tough to review critically, because much of what’s missing for an adult may actually make it more ideal for the intended audience. In this case, I think younger teens and preteens will get a lot out of this novel about …
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Book Review: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
Book #28 of 2019: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik This pastoral winter fantasy novel initially seems like it will be a straightforward retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin myth, and I was already drawn in by the idea of setting that story in a medieval Slavic kingdom with a Jewish heroine. As it develops, however, author Naomi …
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