Books: Betsy Books

Night Owls , winner of the Jewish Book Award for Young Adult Literature, begins when a once-vibrant Yiddish theater on New York’s East Side tells a poetic snippet of her own story in her own voice. Then things get interesting.

Imagine a wide-ranging mix of Jewish legend and lore, tossed into a fun, fantastical tale featuring two shape-shifting vintage-film-loving vampire sisters. They each pursue unlikely love interests, one a first-year Israeli New York University theater student and the other a young Brooklynite who lives with his Syrian Jewish aunt and talks to ghosts.

The characters uncover mysteries on the NQR train platform, within a dusty stash of Yiddish theater backdrops, and in an underground nightclub in the Bowery run by the Prince of Darkness. In A.R. Vishny’s talented hands, what you get is a page turner liberally sprinkled with both witty references to contemporary Jewish life and well-researched snapshots from New York’s storied Jewish history.

In their Judges’ Remarks, the award team from the Jewish Book Council calls Night Owls, “a thor­ough­ly mod­ern, urban tale that will keep [readers] riv­et­ed through every twist and turn.”

Night Owls is the debut novel from Vishny, a Hey Alma* writer whose essays on Jewish representation in pop culture have also appeared in Teen Vogue and the Washington Post . I hope it’s the first book of many.

*If you aren’t familiar with Hey Alma, check them out at heyalma.com . I especially recommend Vishey’s piece called What Is an Estrie?. In it, she goes behind the scenes of her writing process to share her answer to the question she most often hears from Night Owls’ readers.

A trio of other new and notable books are also generating buzz.

The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter by Peter Orner

A fictional Chicago writing professor is obsessed with the mystery surrounding the real-life 1963 tragic death of Essie and Irv Kupicinet’s daughter. The New York Times calls it “a haunting ode to a bygone Chicago.”

Typewriter Beach by Meg Waite Clayton

The bestselling author of The Postmistress of Paris takes readers to McCarthy-era California where a blacklisted screenwriter meets an actress hoping to be Alfred Hitchcock’s new star.

The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah by Jean Meltzer

Just in time for the Festival of Lights, a Jewish second-chance romance reimagines A Christmas Carol .

Betsy Gomberg reads (and sometimes writes about) Jewish books.