Isaac Blum’s second novel, The Judgement of Yoyo Gold (Philomel, Oct. 15), tells the story of an Orthodox Jewish teenager as she defines her own relationship to faith, navigating TikTok, new friendship, and a blossoming romance with Shua, a boy in her community, along the way. Kirkus caught up with Blum over Zoom from his home in Philadelphia; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This book takes place in a similar setting to your debut, The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen. What was similar, and what was different, working on these two books?

With Hoodie, the process was more in my own head. With Yoyo, because it was further from my direct knowledge, I leaned on my editor and my agent, both of whom were Orthodox girls growing up. They helped me not just in terms of their experiences, but in getting the voice down right as best I could.

Writing Hoodie made me want to write the Yoyo story in a lot of ways. Hoodie’s whole thing, and a lot of the humor in that book, is that he’s not thinking about anything. He doesn’t know a lot about what’s going on. I wanted to look at things from the point of view of a character who is more self-aware and dives into stuff at a deeper and more conscious level than Hoodie does. When I started thinking about writing this book, my editor asked me, “Do you think you could write a girl’s voice?” And I said, “Well, maybe, but what do you envision that that is?” And she said that the character needs to be way more aware about what’s actually going on for them to be a realistic female character. That was a really fun part about turning from Hoodie to a new story.

Much of Yoyo’s awareness and arc are also modulated by her role as the daughter of a prominent rabbi.

Candidly, a lot of those decisions are just, How can I raise the stakes? How can I make this tension stronger? If you have community expectations, well, everyone in the community is going to be working under those expectations. The question becomes, How do I ratchet it up for this character? Well, now this person has an even greater set of expectations, because they’re supposed to be a role model. Yoyo being the rabbi’s daughter creates an extra level of stakes and tension that wouldn’t be there otherwise.

The romance between Yoyo and Shua is very fully realized. What was important for you to show in their relationship?

With any rule or tradition that tries to keep people apart, there’s a natural tension. It’s compelling, and I think that drama was part of it. Yoyo having this relationship also provides a contrast in expectations and point of view between young men and young women in this community. A more traditional community often—but not necessarily—has stricter gender dynamics than the society at large has. I think the romance also provides someone for Yoyo within her own community to process her thinking with. She gets to a place where she wants to be a part of the community, but she wants her religion and her traditions to be something that she owns and that she derives meaning from for herself, and not because she’s been told it’s supposed to be meaningful to her. Shua goes on a similar journey, and that enables them to bounce their ideas and thoughts off of one another.

Much of what you’ve said so far betrays strong attention to the craft of writing. Do you attribute that to your work as an English teacher?

You know, I don’t think being an English teacher has anything to do with it [laughs]. So much of it is that the first book I published, Hoodie, was maybe the sixth novel that I wrote. I don’t think what kept those books from getting published was a lack of passion, I think it was either an unwillingness or a lack of skill on my part in engaging intellectually with the craft and with the market side of publishing. Yes, writing is art, you should want to express yourself creatively and all that—but there are also niches in a market, and there are craft expectations. It’s something I have to think about consciously. Someone who interviewed me after the Hoodie book asked a lot of specific questions about the humor, and I was like, well, I’ve never once thought about it. I write a bunch of jokes, and the people who edit the book tell me which ones are funny, and we leave those in, and they tell me which ones aren’t funny, and we take those out. There are many pieces of writing, the voice or the jokes, that are very natural to me and I don’t think about them. But if the question is, What role does Shua play in the story? Well, that really is a calculated thing for me.

You’ve spoken about how one impetus for the Hoodie story was the rising tide of antisemitism. What was it like to write and release Yoyo in context with current events, and the kinds of antisemitism we’ve seen as a result?

When October 7th happened, the book was already in copy edits. It was completely written. I’m not sure that I necessarily would have gone back and changed anything.

The antisemitism that’s in Hoodie has been the same for like, a couple hundred years. A couple thousand. There’s no question of, Will this be relevant two years from now, 10 years from now? Unfortunately, it probably will. Whereas whatever you write right now in response to the current climate, in two or three years when it comes out, I have no idea if it will feel right. We need more hindsight.

It’s a very strange time to be a Jew, period, and a Jew in publishing specifically. You wonder what sort of interest there is in Jewish stories—is it heightened or diminished in this climate? And what kind of stories are Jewish readers looking for? Are they looking for more celebratory or more nuanced stories? It’s really challenging.

What’s next, and do you see it being set in an Orthodox community as well?

I’m working on another book that will come out, knock on wood, in the fall of 2026, and it’s going to be about less observant Jews dealing with grief. At the moment, one of the characters is a more secular Jewish teen boy who experiences a tragedy. In needing to grieve, he reunites with his Jewishness and finds a community that he didn’t have previously. I’m hoping we learn about Jewish mourning practices with him as he finds meaning in these traditions.

What haven’t we talked about yet, that’s on your mind with this book?

When Hoodie came out and I got to talk to people about the book—most of whom weren’t Jewish, because most people aren’t Jewish—people from different faiths said they also saw themselves in his story. A lot of young people are on the same journey of figuring out what they believe versus what their parents believe. So I was thinking about that a lot while making this book: the journey of making your beliefs, your faith, your tradition, your own is a universal one.

Ilana Bensussen Epstein is a writer and filmmaker in Boston.