Oh, look, a character with the maiden name Loew. Wonder where this is going...
I mean, okay, the acknowledgements that mention Throwing Sheyd were a delight and Podos does a pretty good job of not making this a "I have heard of one Jewish thing and it's a golem" story. There's a ton of stuff in here; the golem is just one among many and that makes it more reasonable from my perspective.
Ditto regarding the Holocaust. And, I mean, it's a Jewish fantasy story so where would we be without golems and the scars of intergenerational trauma?
I did like it, though! Like, none of my complaints are about the book itself which, as it stands alone, tells its story well and has delightful characters and skillfully melds plot and story and culture and what it means to be human.
And also sometimes it feels like every story is about the outsider (it is, after all, so much easier to explain the intricacies of Jewish ritual when your main character doesn't know it either) and the overprotective parents and just...I loved what this book did in a new way and some of the familiar choices were a bit too familiar.
(Also fascinating to see the other fantasies that emerge within the text—here's the disabled female rabbi and no one is making even the slightest deal about it; here are a bunch of reasonably observant Jews being totally accepting of their queer family members. May it be soon and in our day. For all the demons, there's also a lot of writing the tikkun olam into being for all the people who don't have it yet.)
I really want to see more Jewish mythology in stories and also I want to see it with Jews who are themselves also already embedded in Jewish culture