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livI read and was very impressed by this review by lannamichaels. And I mentioned it to jack who proceeded to buy me the book for my birthday. And really, Finn and Ezra's bar mitzvah time loop is just as delightful as lannamichaels says.
Finn and Ezra's bar mitzvah time loop by Joshua S Levy. (c) 2024 Joshua S Levy; pub Katherine Tegen Books (Harper Collins). ISBN 978-0-06-324824-3.
My impression of F&EBMTL was that Levy wrote the book he wished existed when he was a kid; I'm guessing he's about my age or a little younger. It's a classic zany timeloop adventure, but everybody in it is Jewish and it's not tediously educational. It is full of allusions and in-jokes that would appeal to someone with insider knowledge of Jewish culture, but also to someone who is a secular nerd who knows the timetravel genre well. The characters are all, casually, named after major 20th century physicists, in a way that could just plausibly be generic European Jewish names. I rolled my eyes at the retiring rabbi Alter being replaced by the new, dynamic rabbi Neumann but actually this fits perfectly into a setting where the main characters are named Rosen and Einstein and the side characters are named Pauli and London.
Finn, who is genre aware, knows full well that you can break out of a timeloop by changing your behaviour and learning the true meaning of why you're here in this life. But he also refuses to see what is right in front of him (the book does lampshade this), and assumes that it must be Ezra who has to learn a lesson and couldn't possibly be him. He's actually really well done as a not entirely likeable protagonist; he's obnoxious in a way that's absolutely plausible for a 13yo who thinks he's smarter than everybody around him, but I still cared about him. It's simplistic and age-appropriate, but I do like that the book uses the two points of view to introduce the question of whether it's necessary to behave ethically if everything resets at the end of the day and people won't remember that you were mean to them.
And I know middle-grade books are a whole different world now – there was barely even such a genre when I was a tween, and books marketed to that age-group were so lacking in diversity and so full of heavy-handed moral messages that I was happy to skip straight from children's books to adult. But I don't tend to seek out modern middle-grade books, partly because I get more satisfaction from longer and more complex books, and partly because if I don't think about it I expect them to be morally improving for middle class white boys. The dark secrets the boys must discover to escape their loops are things that would unquestionably be disruptive and upsetting for young teens, but not Terrible Tragedies where everybody and their dog dies horribly to teach them and the reader to be grateful for what they have.
The framing of a Reform and an Orthodox boy having to be timeloop buddies works really well. It does mean that the book is necessarily male-centric; Levy makes an effort to introduce female characters such as Ezra's sisters and mother, and Finn's classmate as well as the physicist who tries to help. But fundamentally, Ezra has to be a boy because Orthodox girls' bat mitzvahs / bat chayils are really low key, and Finn has to be a boy because a girl could never have inserted herself into Ezra's school and community life. That said, even knowing that books are just better than a generation ago, I found it quite moving to have the contrast be intra-community. This is very much not a book about explaining the weird exotic customs of the Jews over there to a non-Jewish audience (though it wouldn't do a bad job if you needed something like that), and it's not about religious Jewish characters discovering that there's a whole exciting secular world out there if you can just throw off the irritating restrictions of your old-fashioned religion. And it's not about the Holocaust, not even tangentially!!!
So I'm glad this book exists, and I'm glad that DW allowed me to find out that it exists, and I'm glad that we live in a future where you can pay money for the internet to send you books.
lannamichaels. And I mentioned it to jack who proceeded to buy me the book for my birthday. And really, Finn and Ezra's bar mitzvah time loop is just as delightful as lannamichaels says. Finn and Ezra's bar mitzvah time loop by Joshua S Levy. (c) 2024 Joshua S Levy; pub Katherine Tegen Books (Harper Collins). ISBN 978-0-06-324824-3.
My impression of F&EBMTL was that Levy wrote the book he wished existed when he was a kid; I'm guessing he's about my age or a little younger. It's a classic zany timeloop adventure, but everybody in it is Jewish and it's not tediously educational. It is full of allusions and in-jokes that would appeal to someone with insider knowledge of Jewish culture, but also to someone who is a secular nerd who knows the timetravel genre well. The characters are all, casually, named after major 20th century physicists, in a way that could just plausibly be generic European Jewish names. I rolled my eyes at the retiring rabbi Alter being replaced by the new, dynamic rabbi Neumann but actually this fits perfectly into a setting where the main characters are named Rosen and Einstein and the side characters are named Pauli and London.
Finn, who is genre aware, knows full well that you can break out of a timeloop by changing your behaviour and learning the true meaning of why you're here in this life. But he also refuses to see what is right in front of him (the book does lampshade this), and assumes that it must be Ezra who has to learn a lesson and couldn't possibly be him. He's actually really well done as a not entirely likeable protagonist; he's obnoxious in a way that's absolutely plausible for a 13yo who thinks he's smarter than everybody around him, but I still cared about him. It's simplistic and age-appropriate, but I do like that the book uses the two points of view to introduce the question of whether it's necessary to behave ethically if everything resets at the end of the day and people won't remember that you were mean to them.
And I know middle-grade books are a whole different world now – there was barely even such a genre when I was a tween, and books marketed to that age-group were so lacking in diversity and so full of heavy-handed moral messages that I was happy to skip straight from children's books to adult. But I don't tend to seek out modern middle-grade books, partly because I get more satisfaction from longer and more complex books, and partly because if I don't think about it I expect them to be morally improving for middle class white boys. The dark secrets the boys must discover to escape their loops are things that would unquestionably be disruptive and upsetting for young teens, but not Terrible Tragedies where everybody and their dog dies horribly to teach them and the reader to be grateful for what they have.
The framing of a Reform and an Orthodox boy having to be timeloop buddies works really well. It does mean that the book is necessarily male-centric; Levy makes an effort to introduce female characters such as Ezra's sisters and mother, and Finn's classmate as well as the physicist who tries to help. But fundamentally, Ezra has to be a boy because Orthodox girls' bat mitzvahs / bat chayils are really low key, and Finn has to be a boy because a girl could never have inserted herself into Ezra's school and community life. That said, even knowing that books are just better than a generation ago, I found it quite moving to have the contrast be intra-community. This is very much not a book about explaining the weird exotic customs of the Jews over there to a non-Jewish audience (though it wouldn't do a bad job if you needed something like that), and it's not about religious Jewish characters discovering that there's a whole exciting secular world out there if you can just throw off the irritating restrictions of your old-fashioned religion. And it's not about the Holocaust, not even tangentially!!!
So I'm glad this book exists, and I'm glad that DW allowed me to find out that it exists, and I'm glad that we live in a future where you can pay money for the internet to send you books.
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Date: 2025-01-09 11:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-01-09 01:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-01-09 10:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-01-14 01:50 am (UTC)Yeah, same. I had the same progression from kids books right to the adult section; I read some of the stuff for my age level but everything had a moral and pretty much every kid 1) had cancer, 2) kidnapped by a non-custodial parent, 3) other similar things. I knew that midgrade had expanded widely as a market but hadn't read in it; I got started in midgrade because apparently there's non-Holocaust Jewish books now in it that are published by non-Jewish publishers and aren't terrible. Which I was shocked by, but also all the books I get recced for it that are actually good only came out in the last few years anyway, so it's not like this has been going on ever since I aged out of these books. Maybe there's more and no one's told me about them? But I've got niblings in the target area so this is essentially reading books to recommend to them.