on
3.5/5
Non-Fiction
- Get link
- Other Apps
Rating: 2.5/5
Pages: 429
Started: 18 January 2023
Finished: 21 January 2023
Summary:
Liba and her sister Laya live with their parents in the woods outside a small village near the border between Russian and Ukraine. In the village, the non-Jews mostly leave them alone, and the other Jews aren't too bothered by the fact that their mother is a convert. Then, one day, their father gets news that his estranged father is dying. As their mother prepares to accompany him on his journey to visit the the deathbed, she barely have time to explain something important to the girls: Liba is a bear--just like her father, she will soon be able to transform into her ursine form at will. And Laya is a swan, like her mother, With a warning that the girls must protect each other from the packs of bears and swans that will inevitably search fore them, their parents leave.
The next day, a family of fruit sellers arrive to the village, carrying with them ripe fruits that bewitch Laya beyond reason. So Liba, with the aid of Dovid, a boy from the village, must find a way to save her sister, find her parents, control her bear, and protect her community from the pitchfork-and-torch pogroms targeting her community.
Thoughts:
This book weirded the heck out of me. It had a handful of themes and scenes that I thought were super cool, but something about the way characters interacted and the way family dynamics worked, made me uncomfortable.
My favorite part of the book was the fruit. That sounds odd, but the scenes describing the delicious fruit in almost gory detail was really well done. It wasn't played to it's full potential--I think the fruit was actually rotting and its deliciousness was just an illusion--but that never became super clear, which was a waste in my opinion. Craving to disgust is a fascinating slide. I also liked the overall atmosphere, and Rossner's use of Jewish culture and mythology was impressive. The houses and towns and markets and woods were all well-described and easy to picture. Unfortunately, that's where my list of likes about this book ends.
No book should ever--ever-- have a parent talking to their child about how good their sex the other parent was. It's weird. And gross. And weird. From the moment I read that one paragraph, a few pages into the book, I had a feeling the rest of the book was also going to be weird. And it was. The bear/swan situation was also quite uncomfortable, especially in that there was no "we are part of a special race, with a special name, and we've hidden for centuries." The mom just told her daughters, "Hey, you might turn into a bear or a swan. We're going on a trip now!" The fact that the protagonists just ... turned into other animals was odd and not very well done.
But the worst parts of this book were the pacing and the conversations. There's one scene, about half way through the book, where Liba goes to have a conversation with her boyfriend, hears something that I guess she didn't like, and then promptly shouts something like "I can't" and then runs off to the woods to sit next to a creek until the poor guy finds her. This scene was a pretty good example of how mutable emotions were in this book. It was above and beyond normal teenage mood swings, and instead just felt weird and flighty. Important and emotionally charged conversations also happened quickly and in the presence of strangers. The culmination of the book involves every single character sitting in one room, taking turns talking about how proud they are of each other, and confessing the affairs they had. It felt wrong and icky and I'm upset that a book with such a promising setting was ruined so completely by the characters and actions.