Review by Booklist Review
Shiva is experiencing existential inertia following the devastating loss of her father and as the heat of her first love cools. Her mother, Hannah, is present with Shiva during their grief, but it's complicated, as is the way Hannah speaks about her mother, Shiva's maternal grandmother, Syl. Strife pushes Shiva into a box of her late father's belongings, where she finds a short film adaptation he made of the early twentieth-century Russian play, The Dybbuk, a story rich with Jewish folklore. This finding brings Shiva to life. She becomes enchanted with the Jewish storytelling traditions in her family's history, including ancestors from a tiny village in Poland once referred to as The City of Laughter because of its tradition of producing wedding jesters. When she brings this fervor to graduate school, diving head first into her program, her research takes her to Poland, where Shiva's adventure to self-discovery really ignites. With prose that is erudite and alive, this fantastic debut novel explores queer love, first heartbreak, the loss of parents, and the deeply human desire for ancestral connection.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Fruchter debuts with a wondrous intergenerational story of queerness and Jewish folklore. Shiva Margolin, 31 and reeling from her father's recent death, wants to know more about her family, particularly her enigmatic maternal grandmother, Syl, and great-grandmother Mira. Both have long since died, and her mother, Hannah, refuses to talk about them. Shiva, frustrated and feeling stuck in her New York City life and abandoned by her girlfriend, Dani, starts studying the work of Jewish folklorist S. Ansky. Her interest leads her to enroll in a master's program, and she applies for a grant to visit Warsaw, which is only a few hours away from Mira's small town of Ropshitz, where Shiva plans to visit. Back in the U.S., a lonely Hannah tries to adjust to widowhood and begins reckoning with the impact of Syl's anxious parenting (which included constant superstitious warnings about leaving the water on or looking at mirrors and hours spent writing in notebooks Hannah was never allowed to open) and how it affected her own relationship with Shiva. As Shiva and Hannah dive into their family's past, they're each drawn to the same alluring, green-eyed stranger. Chapters from the point of view of the stranger, whom Shiva encounters via a dating app, present the character as an ageless and androgynous folkloric figure who also made contact with Syl and Mira when they were alive. Fruchter draws on folk tales both real and imagined to create a tender and unforgettable portrait of Jewish culture, faith, and community. This dazzling and hopeful novel is not to be missed. Agent: Stephanie Delman, Trellis Literary Management. (Jan.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A multigenerational saga about Jewish women contending with family secrets. Part family saga, part queer coming-of-age campus novel, part phantasmagoria, Fruchter's debut novel certainly resists easy categorization. Not long after her father dies, and inspired by the scraps of stories she's inherited from her mother, Shiva Margolin decides to go to grad school to study folktales. Her mother, Hannah, has spiraled into solitude as a result of her grief. The two aren't getting along because Hannah refuses to tell Shiva anything at all about her own mother, Syl. "Being in the dark about her family's story bothered [Shiva] more than it should," Fruchter writes. "But something was jammed, something slowing her machinery, and she couldn't shake the primary conviction that whatever it was, it was distinctly generational. That there was something in the family past so shadowy and elusive, it meant there were real ghosts here." These chapters are interspersed with 1920s letters addressed to an unknown recipient by Syl's mother, Mira, when Mira was still a young girl. Meanwhile, references to mysteriously androgynous figures--messengers of some kind--begin to crop up. This is a lot for one novel to contain, and Fruchter doesn't always manage it. Her prose often has a self-conscious quality that occasionally leads to awkward phrasings ("there exists a kind of genetics of wanting," for example), and passages that are meant to be narrated by characters living in the past frequently sound unconvincing. There is a great deal of urgency in this novel--loneliness, desire, and yearning, above all--but by the end, that urgency has begun to feel not only overwrought but unearned. In its frantic attempts to be many things, this novel ends up master of none. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
