Odessa
A Novel
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In a powerfully imagined Russia at the height of the pogroms, a grief-stricken family turn to ancient magic to bring their daughter back from the grave.
“A triumph.”―Nat Cassidy, author of Mary and When the Wolf Comes Home
"Spellbinding. . . A tender and gutting showstopper."―Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Yetta is a bright, quick teenage girl with a wild, searching spirit. Stifled by her mother's anxiety, her father’s rules, and the path that’s been laid out for her, she craves freedom, the edges of which she doesn't know. But her family has reason to be cautious and restrictive. Fear has wrapped itself around their shtetl. Jews are mysteriously disappearing, and there are whispers of an impending attack. When violence comes to their door, Yetta is killed.
Her father, in his grief, fumbles through his nascent knowledge of ancient texts and old magic to bring her back. By some miracle, Yetta is returned—but although she looks the same, she is not the girl she once was. Yetta senses there is a secret her family is keeping from her. The answer resides, in part, in the creature lurking in the woods beyond the shtetl―something that may be of her father’s making, and a being that has plans of its own.
"Breathtaking."― Monika Kim, author of The Eyes are the Best Part
"Wonderfully strange, marvelously frightening, and authentically moving."― Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sher sets her spellbinding debut in 1905 Odessa, where pogroms have torn apart the Jewish community. Mordechai works alongside his rabbi to build weapons and study the magic of Kabbalah to prepare for the next attack. Meanwhile, Yetta, his daughter, prepares for marriage to the man she loves, though her free spirit pulls her beyond her community's walls. When Yetta is killed during one of the attacks, Mordechai uses Kabbalah to make a golem identical to her and fuse her spirit into its clay. He keeps the truth of her death a secret from the rest of the family and the revived Yetta herself, now a living weapon for her community. As Yetta struggles to understand what happened to her, Mordechai hopes to use her to enact revenge against their gentile attackers. But another monster has awoken in response to Mordechai's magic, and Yetta will have to confront—or embrace—all her dark parts to save herself and her family. Sher's straightforward prose packs a punch and she doesn't shy away from the realities of Jewish oppression, balancing the novel's more gruesome elements with the palpable love that bonds the community together. The result is a tender and gutting showstopper.
