The story revolves around Marjorie and her sister, Holly, whose marriage to an orthodox Jew has put a strain on the sisters’ relationship. The husband is abrasive and manipulative, and Marjorie doesn’t sympathize much with his religious zealotry. Marjorie throws herself into her work as a Ph.D. candidate studying literature and Jewish folklore, and the emotional content of her work is a constant reminder of the mysterious sect into which her beloved sister has married.
As Holly’s first pregnancy approaches full term, Marjorie returns to the family fold hoping to mend fences. But she succeeds only in reopening old wounds. Then she finds a notebook where her late grandfather wrote down some of the stories he had told the sisters as children. Grandpa Eli’s tales served as the inspiration for Marjorie’s study of Jewish folklore, and are also a strong point of bonding between the siblings.
Naturally Marjorie looks into the origins of these tales. (The folk stories are provided in their entirety within the text.) In them she finds details about her grandfather’s past that complicate everything she knows about her family and cast a new light on her own cultural identity. This is a pretty great premise for a novel, but the book’s execution fails on almost every level: The pacing is stilted and amateurish. The narrative feels like a never-ending stream of exposition. There’s a nasty habit of bookending single lines of dialogue with long, distracting passages about the speaker’s thoughts. And the tone of the present-day story is excruciatingly dull, while that of the folk stories is breathless to the point of banality.
First novels are not always, not even usually, an infallible indication of a writer’s true talents. There are passages here with interesting turns of phrase, and some of the descriptions are genuinely evocative. But let’s hope Feldman considers tone and narrative structure more carefully for her second book.
