A winsome album of Passover riffs, wryly funny with dollops of heartwarming schmaltz.
Suspect dishes, strange visitors, and riotous antics enliven a shtetl’s Passover celebrations in this collection of Jewish stories.
In this third installment of his Village Life series, Abrahmson (the pen name of humorist and klezmer harmonica player Mark Binder) continues chronicling the goings-on in a mythical version of Chelm, Poland. The town is famous in Jewish folklore as a setting for shaggy dog tales that convey off-kilter wisdom. Many of these whimsical, Passover-themed yarns focus on food. Town baker Reb Stein invents matzah—think saltine crackers without the salt—and then sets out to build the biggest slab of it the world has ever seen; a shortage of kosher fare forces the villagers to resort to a cabbage-based holiday menu; and Rabbi Kibbitz wanders into a bakery by accident and is driven to distraction by the pastries and other delicacies forbidden during Passover. Other tales reflect on the holiday’s meaning. A seder gathering answers a knock on the door to discover a mysterious guest who may be the Prophet Elijah or Mark Twain; Chelm’s women insist on leading the seder rituals one year and provoke the men into taking over the cooking; an immigrant family from Chelm finds New York an alienating place until an act of Passover selflessness heartens the clan; and cobbler Reb Gold, his business ruined by a new shoe factory, refuses offers of free Passover matzah from the villagers but is inspired to start a new career publicizing the town’s spirit. Abrahmson’s stories steep readers in quirky characters and the niceties of Passover rituals while working classic themes of Jewish humor, including the subversion of the ideal by the pragmatic, the gap between vainglory and reality—“One of the czars, Fyodor, The Not So Great, had commissioned, from the bakers in Moscow, an unleavened bread the size of a tabletop”—and the discontents of close-knit communities and families whose members sustain one another in annoying ways. The author writes in a gently sardonic style that coils around sly twists. (Invited to a family’s seder one year, Mrs. Chaipul is shocked to discover that its matzah balls are, unlike her own, “soft, chewy, and, above all, edible.”) The result is an entertaining comic celebration of Jewish life and tradition.
A winsome album of Passover riffs, wryly funny with dollops of heartwarming schmaltz.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-940060-45-3
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Light Publications
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.
What hasn’t legendary legal eagle Grisham tried yet? How about a thriller about serial kidnapping and international terrorism.
When Paul and Chelsea Tanner disappear during a day trip on their Paris honeymoon, their abductors demand a ransom of $2 million from Chelsea’s wealthy parents, and a few days later the same sum from Paul’s much less well-heeled parents. After orthopedist Lowell Clayburn, Chelsea’s father, ponies up the ransom without breathing a word to the authorities, his daughter is promptly released. But even though Paul’s parents sell their home, liquidate their assets, and borrow money from the Clayburns to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the villains hold on to Paul anyway. Asked whether he’s ever seen such an outcome in a double kidnapping, FBI deputy director Andrew Strong tells Lowell: “No, this is a new one.” But it’s not, as Strong knows all too well; it’s the third such active case, all involving honeymooning couples whose bridegrooms had served in the armed forces. After masterfully drawing readers in with his bare-knuckle account of the Tanners’ abduction and the attempt by their families and the CIA to tell the lies required to keep caring friends and the rapacious press at bay, Grisham effortlessly switches gears to follow CIA agent Rae Claire Russo and Stuart Nash, a former Department of Justice prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who agrees to marry her so they can serve as bait for the kidnappers, whose motives include justice and revenge as well as cold hard cash. So much for the imprisoned Paul’s wistful reflection that “hopefully, it was only about money.”
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550543
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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