Finished reading: The Merriest Misters by Timothy Janovsky 📚

📚 Authors of children’s books, I am begging you: PLEASE have a newsletter. It’s hard for librarians to keep up with all your new releases and this would make it easier.

🔖📚 Read Friendship Is My Writing Process by Ana Hein (Electric Literature).

I love this. I’ve been thinking about writing a lot lately, and this really resonates with me.

🔖📚 Read Public libraries in TX, LA, and MS are no longer protected by the First Amendment.

This is disheartening as can be and I don’t have the eloquence to explain all the ways it’s terrible.

Finished reading: After Hours at Dooryard Books by Cat Sebastian 📚

Cat Sebastian’s work unfailingly delights me and makes me feel like there’s somebody out there as awkward as me, somebody who feels things as deeply as I do. I’m so glad I read this book.

📚💬 “Farming is not for everyone, but society chooses what kind of farmers to support, and what those farmers get to grow; they’re part of a larger system.” Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal

📚💬 “[The USDA’s] first loyalty has always been to the ag/food industry and to destroying any knowledge that would jeopardize the industry’s profits.” Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal

Faye and her brother Shiloh are half-Japanese and half-Jewish. At their school in Boston, other kids bully them. Over their spring break, their estranged grandfather visits, determines that it’s time to teach them how to build golems, and invites them back to his apartment in New York for training.

While there, Faye and Shiloh start having shared dreams where they are living the lives of other people with the same Hebrew names as them. Faye has the makings of a powerful golemcrafter, but she’s afraid of her power.

Emi Watanabe Cohen has meticulously researched the history of the Jewish diaspora and incorporated the history of Japanese people and Japanese Americans along with that history. Cohen provides an extensive bibliography.

This book is hard to read because it so clearly reflects the struggles Jewish people have faced and continue to face and explicitly connects the antisemitism of the past with the antisemitism of the present. Cohen presents this challenging story beautifully.

Structurally, the story wasn’t quite what I expected. I expected something with a sort of classic fantasy structure, but instead there is a lot of time spent in the dreams and a conclusion that felt to me like it should really be the beginning of the next part of the story rather than the end of the whole thing.

Readers looking for an exploration of Jewish history and why it’s important for Jewish people to hold onto who they are will find that here, from the perspective of modern kids.

I myself am three generations out from the Jewish people in my family who assimilated and intermarried so successfully that nobody was really around to pass on Jewish culture directly in our family. I’ve had to seek it out through other sources. As assimilated as my family has been, I still felt a deep connection to the story of these two kids and their ancestors.

Recommended for kids with interest in Jewish heritage and the commonalities between Jewish people and other oppressed peoples throughout history.

Book: Golemcrafters
Author: Emi Watanabe Cohen
Publisher: Levine Querido
Publication Date: November 12, 2024
Pages: 264
Age Range: Middle Grade
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley, Public library

Finished reading: Golemcrafters by Emi Watanabe Cohen 📚

💬📚 “Hyperlexia is an early sign of golemcraft aptitude. Golems are made of words, just as Jews are made of books.” Emi Watanabe Cohen, Golemcrafters

This is a kid’s novel about two half-Japanese, half-Jewish middle schoolers who learn to make golems from their estranged grandfather.