One Little Goat
A Passover Catastrophe
-
- $21.99
-
- $21.99
Publisher Description
An Indie Bestseller
A Tablet Best Jewish Children's Book
"Here is the time-traveling goat-centric Passover adventure my people have been awaiting for thousands of years.”—Lemony Snicket
A lost afikoman, a time-traveling talking goat, and a never-ending seder illuminate the meaning of Passover in Dara Horn’s hilariously deadpan graphic novel.
A family sits at the Passover seder table, but cannot find their afikoman—the hidden matzah required to end the meal—and as a result, they are trapped at a seder that cannot end. Six months in, a wisecracking talking goat shows up at their door with bad news: Thousands of years of previous seders have accumulated underneath their seder, and their afikoman is stuck in one of them. Now the family’s “wise child” must travel down with the goat through centuries of previous Passovers to find it—and to discover the questions he needs to start asking.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A seder "is a holiday celebrating freedom, but you are stuck at that table for a very long time," complains the unnamed child protagonist at the outset of this irreverent and moving graphic novel. His kvetching proves warranted when his younger sister tosses the afikomen—the piece of matzoh necessary to conclude the seder—into a time-traveling wormhole, and in its absence, the seder drags on for six months. Desperate, the narrator joins forces with the pesky goat from the Passover song "Chad Gadya" to retrieve the afikomen, visiting seders throughout the centuries; as Horn (People Love Dead Jews, for adults) explains, the seder night is like an archeological tell, and "all the seders that ever happened in the past before this one, they're all here, underneath yours." Revelations about Judaism and the youth's own family history await at every stop, depicted in b&w drawings by Ellsworth (Secret Life), whose intricate lined textures and wide-eyed characters evoke Mark Alan Stamaty and Edvard Munch, conveying cosmic wonder and comedic anxiety. During his explorations, the narrator comes to see his family's seder, however messy and querulous, as one link in an unbroken chain of survival, celebration, and identity. Ages 8–12.
