REBECCA REZNIK REBOOTS THE UNIVERSE

Thirteen-year-old neuroatypical Becca is not haunted by Hanukkah goblins.

Last year, bat mitzvah prep got weird when Becca’s best friend, Naomi, got a seemingly helpful golem as a surprise gift (as related in Naomi Teitelbaum Ends the World, 2022). Becca’s relieved the magic has quieted since then, because everything else is dreadful: Her parents are fighting, money’s short, and her brother’s getting scarily violent (once toward an animal). Meanwhile, the rabbi’s teaching that it’s time to be “spiritually grown-ups,” which includes “the ability to sense subtlety and nuance”—not so simple for Becca! So is it good or bad when her friends (all three teens are white Jews) realize that the awful things happening in her family might be because her house is haunted by Jewish demons? The “not-a-goblin-maybe-a-mazzik” is tiny, but if Becca’s friend Eitan hadn’t remembered a story from the Talmud, he wouldn’t have been able to defeat it with a surprisingly clever rhyming game. A “toilet demon,” despite being a demon that literally climbs out of toilets, isn’t comical at all; it almost kills Naomi. Avoiding tropes, Becca’s autism is not superpowered, but her ways of interpreting the world, which she believes make her unfit to fight demons, actually give her enormous power. Perhaps she doesn’t need subtlety or nuance to become a mature Jewish grown-up.

Clever, funny, and scary with an autistic hero and excellent use of obscure Jewish demonology.