THE FORBIDDEN BOOK, Sacha Lamb's sophmore Jewish fantasy novel

THE FORBIDDEN BOOK
SACHA LAMB
Levine Querido (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$10.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Dybbuks.
Illegal printing.
A genderqueer lesbian with a knife.
Set against a backdrop of literary censorship and growing Jewish political consciousness, Sydney Taylor and Stonewall award-winning Sacha Lamb's sophomore novel is a soaring exploration of identity, survival, and ultimately, hope.

On the night before her wedding, 17-year-old Sorel leaps from a window and runs away from her life. To keep from being discovered, she takes on the male identity of Isser Jacobs—but it soon becomes clear that there is a real Isser Jacobs, and people want him dead. Her mistaken identity takes Sorel into the dark underworld of her small city in the Pale of Settlement, where smugglers, forgers, and wicked angels fight for control of the Jewish community. In order to make it out, Sorel must discover who Isser Jacobs really is—and who she wants to be.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Sorel, a lesbian about to be forcibly married to a man, decides that, on balance, she'd rather not, jumps out her window and desperately hunts down a new way to live her life.

Supernatural and political hijinks ensue.

Well? What's the hold-up? Have you one-clicked yet? Just go get the blessèd thing already! You need a chuckle or two, and a high-stakes plot to keep you flippin' the pages. Absent the very interesting and unfamiliar-to-me cast of Jewish folkloric creatures of majgickq, this might have been three-and-a-half stars; the dybbuk alone crests over the four line and we're not even into the head of a woman who so absolutely rejects her cultural and societal repressions across multiple axes; repression SO INIMICAL TO HER that she does the extreme thing of becoming something and someone she chooses for herself. That this happens to land her in deep waters she'd never so much as heard of before made me root for her even harder.

Lesbian or not, give this book to every tween girl you know. More particularly the ones being raised in repessive god-ridden hate cults. Sorel, whose one flaw as a character that I found a bit itchy is that she springs out that window as herself and remains unchanged by the end of the story, is an archetype I wish more young women saw themselves in. (This is also why my stars stop at four.) She is not deeply shaded, but brightly, loudly limned. This kind of person is exciting to meet, often difficult to know well; still more often than that, troublesome.

We badly need that kind of woman in 2025.

Grow a few more, gift this amusing, edifying look into the magical corners of Jewishness widely.