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A review by lesserjoke
The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen by Isaac Blum
4.0
Overall an excellent #ownvoices slice-of-life YA contemporary, about a frum -- ultra-observant Orthodox -- Jewish teen who finds himself shunned by his insular community for striking up a friendship and potential romance with an outside girl. Hoodie (short for Yehudah) is a great protagonist in the vein of Darius the Great is Not Okay or The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian: earnest and funny but clearly carrying his share of flaws, including a stubborn streak, some anger issues, and an extreme naivety about the gentile world. It's plain to the reader that Anna-Marie is not his girlfriend, for instance, despite him describing her that way after they've hung out a few times and hugged. Luckily, that particular misunderstanding is eventually confronted and doesn't majorly derail the plot or anything.
Outside those characters, the main story concerns rising antisemitism in the area, fueled by a perception that recent Jewish arrivals are displacing older residents and altering the local culture of the place. Drawing on and mirroring real incidents of hatred, gravestones are desecrated with spray-paint swastikas, yeshiva schoolboys are mocked and attacked in the streets, and in a horrific moment late in the text, the fifteen-year-old hero is one of the surviving victims of a mass shooting at a kosher market that sees several of his personal acquaintances killed right in front of him.
That point marks a massive pivot in the novel, and I'm not wholly convinced that it needed to be included in order to get author Isaac Blum's message across. It's certainly a jarring tonal shift from the celebration of Jewish life earlier on, as well as a dramatic escalation from the low-level bigotry that has previously struck the sheltered Hoodie as more surreal than hurtful. Ultimately I like the book and its titular narrator too much to offer a rating any lower than four-out-of-five stars, but my favorite parts are the combative classroom arguments about Torah and the wistfully tentative cross-cultural connection between two lonely kids, not the bloody violence that upends all that or its traumatic aftermath.
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Outside those characters, the main story concerns rising antisemitism in the area, fueled by a perception that recent Jewish arrivals are displacing older residents and altering the local culture of the place. Drawing on and mirroring real incidents of hatred, gravestones are desecrated with spray-paint swastikas, yeshiva schoolboys are mocked and attacked in the streets, and in a horrific moment late in the text, the fifteen-year-old hero is one of the surviving victims of a mass shooting at a kosher market that sees several of his personal acquaintances killed right in front of him.
That point marks a massive pivot in the novel, and I'm not wholly convinced that it needed to be included in order to get author Isaac Blum's message across. It's certainly a jarring tonal shift from the celebration of Jewish life earlier on, as well as a dramatic escalation from the low-level bigotry that has previously struck the sheltered Hoodie as more surreal than hurtful. Ultimately I like the book and its titular narrator too much to offer a rating any lower than four-out-of-five stars, but my favorite parts are the combative classroom arguments about Torah and the wistfully tentative cross-cultural connection between two lonely kids, not the bloody violence that upends all that or its traumatic aftermath.
Like this review?
--Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
--Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
--Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
--Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog