ESCAPE ROUTE

A Jewish American teen grows up among the chaos of the late 1960s in Barnehama’s YA novel.

Zach Hineniwas born during the final game of the 1955 World Series—a story that his family of Holocaust-surviving Dodgers fans loves to tell. Zach notes that when the Dodgers won, “they gave every immigrant proof that in America, the bums did have a chance of coming out on top. The home of the free was truly a land of possibility.” Thirteen years later, in 1968, the Dodgers have moved to a different city, the land of possibility seems to be coming apart at the seams, and Zach is preparing for his bar mitzvah. The night before the ceremony, his college-student sister plays him Bob Dylan’s music and gets him high for the first time. He finds he has a taste for the changing times and dives into his teenage years, exploring new music, rooting for his new baseball team—the Mets—and getting into adventures with a tight group of new friends, including the alluring Samm. The war in Vietnam looms over everything, however, and Samm’s older brother is haunted by flashbacks of his tour there. For Zach and the others, the line between the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood is a blurry one, indeed. Over the course of the novel, Barnehama’s prose is smooth even if its content is often heavy-handed, as in this description of when Zach hears Bob Dylan for the first time: “My mind exploded as it tried to wrap itself around ideas being used as maps….Lies and jealousy and mutiny and equality. Dylan spoke those words like they were wedding vows.” Overall, the book is a nostalgia trip, which is both its strength and its weakness. Barnehama successfully captures some of the joys and angst of adolescence, and the Mets material, in particular, is wonderfully specific. However, the main markers of the era—Dylan, Vietnam—feel somewhat shoehorned into the narrative, and readers won’t find the story nearly as revelatory as Zach does.

An uneven and ultimately conventional coming-of-age story set in 1960s Queens.