The Familiar

It was fine. The concept was interesting, but the main character's engagement with her Jewish identity seemed rather superficial, which didn't make a lot of of sense to me for something that was supposed to be a big part of animating her motivation. It's also sort of hard to get behind a character who not only doesn't seem to know what she wants out of life but who doesn't seem to care. We're informed that Luzia is a rebel, an iconoclast, but she is really very passive. I kept waiting for her to make a decision for herself, but things just sort of... happened to her. I was ultimately more interested in what became of her erstwhile employer than what became of the main character herself. As far as the crypto-Jewish elements, it very much read as the author using this framework to explore her own identity and felt shallow.