An Interesting Historical Based YA with Mutil-Cultural Twists
UPDATE: After receiving a copy of the book and reading all of it rather than the sample pages for my original review, I found the book to be very good, even for someone who is not in middle school. The book incorporates a lot of history from the 1960's, but the prejudice (religious and racial) makes this story totally contemporary. It is kind of fun for the characters to not have mobile phones as a way to plan secret meetings. My original impression starts below:
This seems to be a sweet and charming family story with two sisters. And then there is the uh-oh, oh-no moment when older sister Leah says she is in love. Okay, we all know that eighteen-year-old girls feel that they are in love all the time, yet in this case, something seems wrong. Leah is crying, and even her younger sister knows that their parents are not going to be happy that the young man is not Jewish. It seems like this book could touch upon a very contemporary dating and romance situation- people of different religions and races, which could still be an "issue" with older generations. Since the girls' parents have expressed concern about Leah taking dancing lessons on Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, then it is pretty clear that a love interest with a Hindu boy from India who works at the record store (a very popular place in the 1960's - the setting of this story) is going to cause a ruckus in the family.
I think I would have felt a little more drawn into the story if it had been either first or third person narrator. But Ariel,the younger sister through whose eyes the reader actually seems to be viewing the action, is addressed as you rather than Ariel speaking as "I" or the third-person point of view. UPDATE- this did not bother me after a few chapters; the story flowed naturally.
This seems to be a sweet and charming family story with two sisters. And then there is the uh-oh, oh-no moment when older sister Leah says she is in love. Okay, we all know that eighteen-year-old girls feel that they are in love all the time, yet in this case, something seems wrong. Leah is crying, and even her younger sister knows that their parents are not going to be happy that the young man is not Jewish. It seems like this book could touch upon a very contemporary dating and romance situation- people of different religions and races, which could still be an "issue" with older generations. Since the girls' parents have expressed concern about Leah taking dancing lessons on Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, then it is pretty clear that a love interest with a Hindu boy from India who works at the record store (a very popular place in the 1960's - the setting of this story) is going to cause a ruckus in the family.
I think I would have felt a little more drawn into the story if it had been either first or third person narrator. But Ariel,the younger sister through whose eyes the reader actually seems to be viewing the action, is addressed as you rather than Ariel speaking as "I" or the third-person point of view. UPDATE- this did not bother me after a few chapters; the story flowed naturally.