The Slaughterman's Daughter: A Novel

This one just never came together for me. I had some quotes noted down to highlight, but in the end I just didn't bother.

So you have a Jewish lady, who's also a butcher, off on a wild adventure to recover her sister's husband who up and left her unceremoniously several months past. She meets up with an unlikely cast of characters who all dedicate themselves to this otherwise-unremarkable quest. Mishaps happen. Lots of parts that were intended to be funny, but just made me a little impatient. A middle part that dragged on too long. An ending that was, actually, kind of satisfying.

This story is definitely not told linearly and the POV hops around a ton. This is one of those books that tells a story, stops halfway, picks up another story, repeats, goes back to the first story at some point later, and essentially juggles story threads until most either unravel or a few resolve at the end. For someone not native, there's lots of untranslated Yiddish(?) words that you have to figure out via context clues (or Google, in the case of some of them, as long as you get close enough with the spelling). The names also really blended together for me, and it was hard keeping the main players straight.

I think there's a story here, there must have been because I thought the ending to this mess was actually kind of satisfying. But the work it took to get me there was almost more than I was willing to give. YMMV.