2022 book 66

 Katherine Locke's This Rebel Heart

So this is the story of a Jewish girl in Hungary in 1956, on the eve of the revolution. But it’s not a straightforward historical novel—there’s a fair amount of magical realism going on, like Budapest being literally leached of colors, the river being magical, and an angel of death that happens to be hanging around (making out with local youths) (like 75 percent of the dudes in this book are bi). I think this book does a lot of things well—excellent on the Jewish stuff and Holocaust survivor narratives, dealing with the sins committed by your fathers, cool friendships and newspaper shenanigans, etc. But like my issue is that I /knew/ how this revolution went, so the back half of the book is slow and also suffused with dread, which isn’t super fun to read (I wasn’t that invested in the characters and their makeouts, but maybe it needed more of that?). I did appreciate the golem talk, though. And the girl power. The ending just didn’t totally land for me. As a side note, there is an informative author's note at the end that does /mention/ the current issues with anti-semitism in Hungary, but I really think that needed to be hammered home more since it is such a big part of the story itself. Like, that problem was not cured. B+.