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.

WHEN THE ANGELS LEFT THE OLD COUNTRY, multi-award and -honor winner, as well as anti-semitism fighter

WHEN THE ANGELS LEFT THE OLD COUNTRY
SACHA LAMB
Levine Querido
$19.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

A 2022 New York Public Library Best Young Adult book!

2023 Stonewall Book Award for Children’s & Young Adult Literature

2023 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature

2023 Sydney Taylor Book Award for Young Adult

The Publisher Says: A queer immigrant fairytale about individual purpose, the fluid nature of identity, and the power of love to change and endure.

Uriel the angel and Little Ash (short for Ashmedai) are the only two supernatural creatures in their shtetl (which is so tiny, it doesn't have a name other than Shtetl). The angel and the demon have been studying together for centuries, but pogroms and the search for a new life have drawn all the young people from their village to America. When one of those young emigrants goes missing, Uriel and Little Ash set off to find her.

Along the way the angel and demon encounter humans in need of their help, including Rose Cohen, whose best friend (and the love of her life) has abandoned her to marry a man, and Malke Shulman, whose father died mysteriously on his way to America. But there are obstacles ahead of them as difficult as what they’ve left behind. Medical exams (and demons) at Ellis Island. Corrupt officials, cruel mob bosses, murderers, poverty. The streets are far from paved with gold.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Multiple awards and honors and nominations later, it's very clear that the Industry recognized this story as one that has a lot to say, and a very winning way of saying it. The publisher tells us it's got a very Good Omens vibe...true enough, but don't expect Aziraphael and Crowley's intimate dynamic here. Like Good Omens there is an omniscient narrator, well used to keep us on the track of our angel and demon as they set about trying to right the wrongs "their" humans, the ones from the shtetl they've adopted as their home, endure.

Here I pause to mention something that could impact your readerly pleasure. There is a lot of Yiddish used in the story, which for the time and place is absolutely correct. It isn't translated, and at times the word or concept isn't entirely obvious from context only. I recommend that you have the browser open on some device, if you're reading a tree-book, to look up the words you don't think you've got right in your mind's eye. Ebooks usually have adequate dictionary access to tell you what you need to know if it isn't in the provided glossary. I myownself wasn't thrown by this but as anyone who's not here for the first time knows, I'm weird.

Rose is our main human character, a young woman just coming to terms with her lesbian identity. The early twentieth century was a lousy time to be a woman, let alone one who loved other women! Her best friend and love object has just gone away to the Lower East Side of Manhattan to marry a man, as is expected of any frum young woman in that place and time. Our supernatural entities are, for a contrast to everyone else, utterly unfazed by Rose's love for Dinah. They know their purpose is to help Rose (among others) get to the New World and take her shot with Dinah...if it can work out, as she's got this impending marriage thing....

Assisting a dead rabbi's ghost in finding his daughter so she can mourn him properly and thus prevent him fom entering awful dybbukhood, dispensing social justice to exploitive sweatshop owners, not to mention greedy steerage-selling profiteers gouging their fellow Jews out of the last tiny hint of savings, the evil christian supernaturals posing as immigration doctors to prevent Jews from entering the US...all this and more must be taken into righteousness before our supernatural duo can go back to Torah study and peace in Shtetl.

I genuinely think the playfulness of Author Lamb's imagination makes the difficult and unfair nature of the issues to be surmounted less unhappy than it would be in less amusing hands. I know the entire time Rose shows a brave face to the world, where we-the-readers know she's completely terrified but too outraged to let whatever it is pass unchallenged is the kind of message I want to send to all young women. Especially young Jewish women in the rising anti-semitic culture we've allowed to metastasize. It's a good read as a fantasy novel for adults, too; the Mythopoeic Society doesn't pass out their accolades with a shovel.

I can't go with a perfect rating because there are points towards the end that just go on too long. The pace overall is never breakneck, or really even brisk. The aforementioned Yiddish-language heavy text does wear on the Anglophone inner ear after a while. All that said, I still think this is a great Booksgiving choice for your thirteen-and-up nieces who enjoyed Good Omens.

And yourownselves, of course, why should those little pishers have all the fun?