A colorful and engaging animal tale set in a biblical world.
A Christian fantasy focuses on the days leading up to the Great Flood.
This elaborate tale features a cast of anthropomorphized animal characters: Judah, a lion; Sophia, a green serpent; Azel, a goat; Lumis, a wolf; and Eloshova, a black sheep. As the story unfolds, they’re all caught up in a vague mystical vision beckoning them across the landscape of a strange Old Testament world full of wonders and perils. They are trying to reach the Mountain of Gathering, where the mysterious call is drawing representatives of all living things on Earth in preparation for the Great Flood and the launching of Noah’s Ark. Milor deftly evokes this little-known world that would have existed in the brief interval between the opening of the book of Genesis and the story of the Great Flood. The conceit is brilliantly elegant in its simplicity, filling in a gap in the traditional biblical narrative with a modern-style, middle-grade adventure featuring vibrant characters, exotic locations, and plenty of exciting plot twists. These elements are guaranteed to hold the interest of young Christian readers already familiar with the famous stories of the Bible. Judah and his friends have distinct and sometimes clashing personalities. They must learn to overcome both their personal differences and the many obstacles Milor puts in their paths as they make their way across a realm the author very inventively imagines from the scant clues provided in the early sections of Genesis.
Each of the work’s chapters is accompanied by a full-color plate by debut illustrator Lopez, the author’s daughter-in-law, and is followed by an intriguing critical gloss by Milor. After a chapter featuring the villain of the piece, Nephram, for instance, the author switches his focus and pitches his commentary straight to his book’s adult readers. “Again and again, Nephram is completely baffled by what he sees concerning Judah and all the animals following him,” he writes. “In a similar way, the people of the world are often mystified by Christians, and either mock their faith, or rally against it.” At another point, when the heroes are temporarily lost, Milor again draws a larger lesson: “By providing a light to our feet, God is walking very close with us, and ensuring we stick by His side, rather than running off into the darkness ahead of Him, to places we are not ready to encounter yet. Every step we take, with the little bit of light that we have, is an active process of seeking.” These annotated sections, set off in a smaller type font, are clearly addressed not to children but to their parents and teachers as a guide to the tale’s many allegorical layers. The combined effect is ultimately winning: Adults will be as captivated by the commentary as children will be by the main story of courageous animals in peril.
A colorful and engaging animal tale set in a biblical world. (Color and black-and-white illustrations)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 237
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A charming and incisive debut.
Four young nuns wind up running a halfway house full of quirky characters in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.
Four Catholic sisters live with the elderly Sister Roberta in upstate New York. All on the edge of turning 30, the young women are at loose ends: Their day care is shuttered, and Sister Roberta is retiring. However, the four women refuse to be parted: “We were fixed to one another, like parts of some strange, asymmetrical body: Frances was the mouth; Mary Lucille, the heart; Therese, the legs. And I, Agatha, the eyes.” Eventually, the Buffalo diocese decides to transfer them to Rhode Island, where they are put in charge of running Little Neon, a “Mountain Dew”–colored house for residents trying to get sober and get back on their feet. When the local Catholic high school needs someone to teach geometry, the sisters volunteer Agatha, who is labelled as the quietest but the smartest of the quartet. As Agatha immerses herself in her new life, she finds the residents of Little Neon, from parolee Baby to Tim Gary, whose disfigured jaw prevents him from finding love, open her eyes to new realities, as do her colleagues and students at the high school. Eventually, Agatha can no longer ignore that the church, and most of all she herself, is changing. Luchette’s novel, her first, is structured in small chapters that feel like vignettes from a slightly wacky indie film. The book is frequently vibrant with resonant images: Agatha learning to roller skate in Little Neon’s driveway or a resident drunk in a sequined dress riding a lawnmower through the snow. But even though the book feels light, Luchette does not turn away from the responsibility of examining the darkness undergirding the institution of the Catholic Church.
A charming and incisive debut.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-26526-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
A captivating Jewish twist on the classic American campus novel.
In Hopen’s ambitious debut, an Orthodox Jewish high school student finds his world transformed when his family moves to South Florida.
When protagonist Ari Eden leaves his bland life in Brooklyn—where he never felt deeply rooted—for a glitzy, competitive Modern Orthodox day school in the Miami suburbs, both readers and Ari himself are primed to expect a fish-out-of-water narrative. And indeed, Ari finds that his new classmates, though also traditionally observant by many standards, enjoy a lifestyle that is far more permissive than his own (a shade of Orthodoxy that is known as “yeshiva”). Suddenly Ari’s modest, pious world is replaced with a Technicolor whirlwind that includes rowdy parties, casual sex, drinking, drugs, and far more liberal interpretations of Jewish law than he has ever known. With its representation of multiple kinds of traditional Judaism, Hopen’s novel is a refreshing corrective to the popular tendency to erase the nuanced variations that exist under the umbrella of “Orthodoxy.” It also stands out for its stereotype-defying portrayal of Ari and his friends as teenagers with typical teenage concerns. But this is not just a novel about reorienting oneself socially or even religiously; though Ari’s level of observance certainly shifts, this is also not a simple “off the derech” (Jewish secularization) narrative. Ari’s new friend group, particularly its charismatic, enigmatic leader, Evan—a sort of foil for Ari—pushes him to consider new philosophical and existential norms as well as social, academic, and religious ones. The result is an entirely surprising tale, rich with literary allusions and Talmudic connections, about the powerful allure of belonging. This novel will likely elicit comparisons to the work of Chaim Potok: Like Potok’s protagonists, Ari is a religious Jew with a deep passion for literature, Jewish texts, and intellectual inquiry, and as in Potok’s fiction, his horizons are broadened when he encounters other forms of Orthodoxy. But Hopen’s debut may actually have more in common with campus novels like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Tobias Wolff’s Old School; its narrator’s involvement in an intense intellectual community leads him down an unexpected path that profoundly alters his worldview. The novel suffers due to its lamentably one-dimensional, archetypal female characters: the tortured-artist love interest, the ditsy blond, the girl next door. Hopen’s prose, and the scale of his project, occasionally feels overindulgent, but in that sense, form and content converge: This stylistic expansiveness is actually perfectly in tune with the world of the novel. Overall, Hopen’s debut signals a promising new literary talent; in vivid prose, the novel thoughtfully explores cultural particularity while telling a story with universal resonances.
A captivating Jewish twist on the classic American campus novel.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-297474-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
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