Book #199 of 2019: The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman There are some lovely individual moments in this novel about characters in 1940s Europe evading and resisting the Nazis, but I’m ultimately dissatisfied by the overall shape of the narrative and by how little author Alice Hoffman has developed the various elements of …
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Book #188 of 2019: Anya and the Dragon by Sofiya Pasternack I’m really enjoying the recent trend of explicit Jewish representation in speculative fiction, and this new middle-grade fantasy novel is another fun example. The story is populated with all sorts of creatures from Slavic folklore, but the main conflict facing twelve-year-old Anya isn’t a …
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Book #170 of 2019: Resistance by Jennifer A. Nielsen On the surface, this novel about teenage Jewish resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Poland is a welcome piece of YA historical fiction, educating all ages about a lesser-known aspect of World War II. The characters are invented, but they are inspired by Jennifer A. Nielsen’s extensive research …
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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 …
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 #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 #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 #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 #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 #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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