dominic_t's review
adventurous
challenging
emotional
informative
slow-paced
2.5
This book has some really interesting folk tales, but I found it hard to get through. It's very long and slow paced. It's very formulaic; each chapter is the shammas telling the rabbi a story that his grandmother told him. It was an interesting framing device, and it worked well to connect all these stories. However, the intros to the stories were reused a lot. The shammas would start the story by telling the rabbi that he was overworked or by talking about the shoe scraper he repurposed to tend the fire in the stove. The book would have been significantly shorter if some of these repetitive interactions had been cut out. It made it a bit of a slog to get through by the end.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death
Moderate: Child death and Death of parent
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