WHAT MAKES US

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.