ilana

A pageturner, for sure. A nearly-grown-up malcontent escapé from the Gifted and Talented track makes his way to a magic school and then to not!Narnia? Sign me up!

The prose is tight, fun, unique, and rollicking. The worldbuilding is interesting – it knowingly sacrifices originality for wink-and-nudge callbacks, referencing Harry Potter, Narnia, Lord of the Rings, Earthsea, and (possibly) the film Pan's Labyrinth. The imagery was often extremely vivid, and immersive – I often felt like I was physically there, on the welters court, in a snowfield, cruising at altitude above the world. And I wanted desperately, at all times, to know what would happen next.

In the end, though, I was left feeling cold. Quentin didn't seem to experience much personal growth through the 400-some pages of the book, despite going through incredible numbers of unique and challenging experiences over four or five years in total. However, he seemd to accrue only trauma, and little wisdom, by the end of the book. I found him more difficult to like the more time passed in the story; surely, I kept thinking, now he'll begin to grow as a person. But it never really happened.

The other characters often felt thinly written, too. They were so dynamic that I wanted to know more about their inner lives, but these were only ever hinted at. They seemed to exist mostly as foils to or supports for Quentin, which in the case of Alice was particularly disappointing, given how her story ultimately shook out.

I enjoyed this, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it.

I would say this book is “important” more than I would say it is “good”. It's a seminal text in studies of Jewish ethnicity and racial assignment, but it's missing important information and is pretty dated at this point.

Firstly, as others have (correctly) noted, the book is almost solely about the Ashkenazi American experience, and does not acknowledge or discuss non-Ashkenazi culture. This is an enormous missed opportunity for several reasons; it fails to consider the cultural distinctiveness of other Jewish ethnic groups, which has major implications for the construction and assignment of identity.

Sephardic Jews from Western Europe (Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands) were among the earliest Jews to come to the US in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and many of them had an important roles in the building of the country. Brodkin also doesn't consider the fact that a not-insignificant number of non-Ashkenazi Jews (Sepharadim and others) very much do pass as white.

Brodkin likewise doesn't take American “Jews of colour” into account, whether these are ethnic Jews of non-Ashkenazi ancestry who are not white in appearance, or non-white American converts to Judaism. These people are also American Jews, and they play a role in Jews' construction of racial identity, and in the racial assignment of Jews.

Secondly, the book is now dated (it was first published in 1998, and one chapter was published in 1994). It's simply no longer current in terms of discourses around Jewishness and race/ethnicity, or discourses around race/ethnicity in general in the 2010s and 2020s.

While I wouldn't not recommend this book, it's best read in concert with/alongside other texts on Jewishness and race/ethnicity, particularly alongside David Schraub's paper “White Jews: An Intersectional Approach” (AJS Review, vol. 43, no. 2, 2019). Other recommended readings on this subject are listed here: Bibliography: readings on Jewish race/ethnicity, whiteness, and antisemitism

A third problem with this book is that it tries to be autoethnography, history, and historiography simultaneously, and doesn't excel at any of those – the personal elements of Brodkin's narrative are scant (but present enough to be noteworthy and to make the reader wonder how much this book is an attempt at self-exculpation), and the historiography is limited to a few criticisms of other, earlier writers' paternalism and racism (in the latter chapters). The history is relatively scholarly and well-researched, but the writing is unbelievably dry.

I have been re-reading this book on a yearly or twice-yearly basis since probably 2008. Few things are sadder for me than knowing there's no more writing to be had from this author – I wish him well, wherever he is!

I can't really say more about how good this story is, but the fact that I've returned to it time and time and time again indicates to me that this is a story that's held up year or over year and has stood the test of time.

Go and read it yesterday!

I got about a third of the way through this before a) it was recalled by the library and b) I got bored. I was excited to read this because because so many readers had sung its praises and becauseI remembered liking Circe, but I found the main character dull and the love interest even duller. Maybe I'll give it another go someday, but as it stands I'm not really sure what people like about this book beyond the concept.