This book was ridiculously good. Some observations follow:
MaNishtana’s execution of narrative voice is just pitch perfect. It is exactly what this story needs because it also performs the tightrope walk between identities that the main character does. How does it sound to balance blackness, Jewishness, adulthood in Brooklyn in 2016? Exactly like this.
This book is also a balance of identification and recognition of difference. Reading about rabbis unwanted for their identity, it’s hard not to have it resonate because, well, Maharat. But women in Orthodox Judaism and black Jews in Jewish spaces have radically different experiences. They might rhyme, but that doesn’t mean one isn’t a sonnet and the other isn’t epic verse. Although identifying with the English major, major geek, socially awkward, now rabbi at the heart of this book isn’t, you know, a STRETCH for me.
Rosenstern and Guildencrantz, OMG. I love this book already. Reading this book in New York DEFINITELY made me appreciate some of the “this really happened” elements.

I really want to put this book in conversation with Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs, not just because I read them basically back to back, but because they’re both books by insiders writing about this Jewish community in a way that is willing to call out its hypocrisy, its obsessions with its golden calves, its failures in the way it speaks to one another.
But they’re also very different books written at very different times in the history of the novel (although, arguably, less different than they might be) and with very different arcs. And one is a comedy and one is a tragedy. And who the outsiders are and are not also shifts. But I’d love to do this nonetheless.
Anyway, it’s been a heck of a weekend for good books.