Author: Jessamyn Hope
April 1, 2015
“In 1994 Kibbutz Sadot Hadar becomes a haven for several individuals trying to make better lives for themselves. Adam, an addiction-prone New Yorker, aims to deliver a gift to a woman his grandfather loved 50 years earlier on the kibbutz. Claudette, a thirtysomething refugee from a life in a French-Canadian orphanage, struggles to overcome obsessive-compulsive disorder. Ulya, a Russian immigrant pretending to be Jewish, schemes to get to Manhattan. Farid, a Palestinian farm worker, wants to open a restaurant. Ofir, a gifted teenage musician, has lost his hearing in a terrorist bombing. And finally Ziva, the kibbutz’s octogenarian founder, endeavors to force the community to maintain the socialist idealism on which the settlement was originally founded. VERDICT As Hope deftly juggles the various stories and backstories of her protagonists and the 600-year-old history of the sapphire brooch that Adam wishes to deliver to his grandfather’s mysterious lost love, the debut novelist, a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, weaves an intricate tapestry of love and longing, failure and redemption. Not every character will be saved but readers will keep rooting for them.”
—Andrea Kempf, formerly with Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS, for Library Journal