What Makes Us

August 15, 2019
A crowded sophomore effort tackles nature and nurture, family secrets, friendship, the place of violence in protest, terrorism and patriotism, Judaism and Zionism, and all the things that make a person. Racially indeterminate 17-year-old Eran knows he gets his (sometimes uncontrolled) anger from his Israeli mother. He is sure his unknown father could have provided the cure--until he learns his Algerian Israeli father was a terrorist who bombed an Israeli Day parade before being fatally shot himself. In first-person, present-tense, Eran deals with the fallout when he gets involved in a social justice protest, his father's past becomes news, and people in their suburban Texas town suspect he and his mother are terrorists, agitating to "SEND THEM BACK!" Intercut is the third-person, present-tense story of Eran's new friend Jade, who is black and Baptist. Parallels between the two are made painfully obvious: Eran notes "no one ever talks about sunrise"; hundreds of pages later, Jade thinks the same about sunsets. Jade's family also harbors secrets, and she too is deeply affected by events she doesn't recall. With lyrical prose bordering on overdone ("Many girls are drawn to the melody, she knows, but melodies bore Jade") and a plot that stalls when the narrative moves to Jade, this is a book that wants to be many things and falls into an awkward space between quiet and contemplative and boldly topical, doing justice to neither. Provocative but uneven. (Fiction. 13-18)

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September 1, 2019

Gr 9 Up-It's a toss-up whether this book focuses on single mother Devorah or on her teenaged son Avi, and that's a compliment. Entangled by their love for each other, these two struggle to come to terms with the past that Devorah has tried to protect Avi from with her silence: he doesn't know that his father killed himself and three others with a bomb. "This is not our fight," Devorah told the press; Avi was two at the time. She changed her name to Eema and Avi's to Eran, moved from New York to Houston, and kept her secret as her son grew. Readers meet Eran in high school. He mythologizes his father as the absent parent and blames Eema, the one who stayed, for the anger he cannot always manage, even as he admires her self-control. In his rage Eran resembles his father, but only Eema knows this. After Eran and his friends organize a protest against gun violence and a negative encounter goes viral, an investigative journalist uncovers what his father did. As mother and son reckon with the truth and their little family of two hangs in the balance, a local synagogue offers refuge and a sense of belonging. This coming-of-age story has heft-and much relevance. VERDICT Strong medicine for readers interested in how society accepts or rejects those who are different. An excellent choice for mature audiences.-Georgia Christgau, Middle College High School, Long Island City, NY

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