This historical romance has been on my TBR list for a while; since the moment I saw a hunky kippah-wearing man on the front cover. I don't know about you, but most of the time, I forget what's even on my TBR. I'm so glad I remembered this gem and actually picked it up to read because it was so much more than I expected. This week, it's Felicia Grossman's Marry Me by Midnight, a Jewish gender-swapped retelling of Cinderella. Similar to Jean Meltzer's Jewish pride and joy in her romcoms, ...
musing
WOMS: Magical Meet Cute
We're back this week with another Jean Meltzer special, this time in the form of a hunky golem (maybe). It's Magical Meet Cute! After an antisemitic attack, Faye---a former lawyer turned ceramicist living in Upstate New York---gets drunk and makes her perfect man out of clay inspired by the golem stories of old. But when a stranger walks in front of her bicycle the next day, leading to a horrible crash and amnesia for the poor guy, she wonders just how much magic she conjured the night ...
WOMS: Kissing Kosher
We're continuing this week with more Jewish fiction, this time with Jean Meltzer's Kissing Kosher, a delectable tale as sweet and rich as a loaf of babka. In this romantic comedy, with similar vibes to Romeo and Juliet, there are two feuding families whose patriarchs started a bakery half a century ago, but what neither family agrees on is who wronged who. Caught in the middle is Avital Cohen, granddaughter to Chayim Cohen, founder and owner of Best Babka in Brooklyn, an artisan kosher ...
WOMS: The Familiar
I hadn’t planned on reading The Familiar because the cover creeped me out a bit and I wasn’t sure if it would be too dark for me. How wrong I was. I’m so glad my friend persuaded me to give this a read because it was a heartbreaking, beautiful love story, one only Leigh Bardugo could have written. Though I haven’t read her new Ninth House series, I have read all but one of Bardugo’s Grishaverse books. To me, Bardugo is a superior writer because she has a way of weaving tragedy so humane ...
From Mourning to Joy
This past year is coming to an end, at least on the Jewish calendar, and that means I have been reminiscent, as one does when they assess their lives before the chagim, or holidays. For us, for Israel, this past year has been tinged, if not saturated, with sorrow and grief. Since October 7, our lives have never been the same. There have been days where my grief was near inconsolable, where I wandered through the day like a phantom, feeling more a shadow of myself than anything real or ...
