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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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