Respectful, if not particularly informative or revealing.
In this trio of short stories, teenagers have brief but life-changing encounters with religious leaders or founders.
All three young people make decisions that solidify their senses of collective identity: Dina must choose between the relative comforts of life as a slave to one of pharaoh’s queens or heeding her “rebel” great-uncle Moses’ call to freedom; the miracles and message of Mattan’s one-time Nazareth neighbor ease his restlessness and show him a better way to resist his Roman overlords; though it means leaving Mecca and his own tribe behind, Fallah joins Muhammad’s new community, in which “everybody has equal value—everybody.” Beckert depicts the narrators in three painted scenes, but Moses, Jesus and Muhammad appear only in the prose—and there just briefly. Though Lowinger’s portrayals of the three eras are idealized, she does fold some historical detail into both the stories and epilogues that follow each. Along with contrasting the simplicity of monotheism over polytheism throughout, she also incorporates a few very basic teachings and appends short notes on each faith’s scriptures and cultural practices.
Respectful, if not particularly informative or revealing. (maps) (Short stories. 10-13)Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-55451-617-9
Page Count: 118
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
A 17-year-old has a shallow religious epiphany followed by an equally shallow retreat from religion and political awakening. In the old days, Mia repeatedly assures us, she only wanted "to get high, make music and have sex." Now she's studying at a Jerusalem yeshiva; hoping for a spiritual reawakening, Mia has blindly decided she'll find it in Orthodox Judaism. Unfortunately, she connects neither with her classmates nor their religious or political beliefs. The more she learns about the ugly creation of Israel's national myth of a previously empty land being made green, the more barren she finds Orthodox Judaism. Her political self-education gets tangled up with her conviction that she is "sick of wearing ugly clothes," her disinterest in yeshiva studies and her lust for Andrew, the sexy guitar bum she meets in the streets of Jerusalem. The issues are vitally important, but the heroine's facile acceptance of a hot boy's pacifism is hardly convincing, the straw-man yeshiva students diminish the painful political realities and Mia just isn't likable enough to carry the tale. (Fiction. 12-13)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55469-265-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Orca
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's 1937, and Anya is becoming accustomed to Shanghai. Her family had to flee Odessa in the night after Papa told that ugly policeman he wouldn't join the Communist Party. Now China is home for her whole family: Papa, Mama (a former opera singer), Mama's parents, Babushka and Dedushka, and baby brother Georgi. In Shanghai's French Quarter, they live Jewish lives as if the Japanese weren't advancing on the city. Anya's biggest worry is the prospect of telling her mother she doesn't want to become an opera singer—until the day she finds a baby in the gutter. Will Mama and Papa let her keep the baby? Anya's Shanghai is richly chaotic, polyglot and packed with refugees. Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Mandarin Chinese and Italian pepper the dialogue. Meanwhile, immigrant Anya happily devours her buckwheat piroshki with chopsticks after Papa has recited the Hebrew blessings over the food. The chaos of the prose is less felicitous; characters whisk between conversations without segue. A delightfully textured—but confusingly rushed—glimpse at a little-remembered period of Jewish history. (Historical fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-37093-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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