Wednesday, May 25, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: From Dust a Flame by Rebecca Podos

 





From Dust a Flame is a 2022 Young Adult Fantasy novel by author Rebecca Podos, who happened to be the editor of (and a contributor to) the recent Fools in Love anthology of YA Romance short stories that I happened to like a lot.  Still, I wasn't really that interested in exploring her longer fiction until I saw a review of this book on Tor.com, praising its take on "complicated relationships with Judaism, queerness, and becoming"* - a take that immediately piqued my interest.  Fantasy based upon Jewish Folklore, dealing with Judaism and Jewishness in general, as well as queerness and the modern world today is right up my alley, and I immediately reserved this book both at my e-library and my physical library.  

*That review, by Maya Gittelman, is undoubtedly better than mine and can be found here by the way.  

And I really really liked From Dust a Flame, which features a 17 year girl Hannah, who wakes up one day after her birthday with animal like traits that grow stranger and stranger every day, and goes on a journey with her brother Gabe to try and find some answers and a cure....and discovers her unknown Jewish heritage, one which holds answers to her past and future.  It's a really great coming of age story that deals not just with Jewish folklore, but also with the various things it means to be Jewish, as well as to be queer, and shows how generations of women can struggle with circumstances that force them to make dangerous and desperate choices.  So yeah this is a definite winner, and my only complaints about it probably stem from wanting more rather than anything less or different.  
-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------------
Since her father died, Hannah Williams has only had her mother and her older (adopted) brother Gabe.  She barely knows her father's distant Canadian parents, and her mother never talks about her past or family....and relocates them nearly every year, as if she's on the run from something.  To make matters worse, her mother always shines her affection upon Gabe and rarely upon her, and so Hannah is determined to work as hard as she can to prove she's worth her mom's love....even convincing her mom to keep them in Boston after she gets a scholarship to a private high school.  But it doesn't seem to be appreciated, and soon Gabe will go away to college and leave her alone, a thought she dreads.  

But then Hannah wakes up on her seventeenth birthday with a animal-like eyes....and then each day after that with those replaced by other more bizarre and debilitating animal features....and her mom goes off promising to find someone who can help.  But when her mom doesn't return, and Hannah and Gabe get an invitation to sit Shiva for their unknown maternal grandmother, Hannah and Gabe go off to the town of Fox Hollow to rediscover their previously unknown Jewish roots and to get some answers.  

There in Fox Hollow Hannah finds a family and a culture she never imagined, one she isn't sure how to consider in the context of her own life.  But what she also finds is a past going back two generations that may explain her mother's frightful fleeing...but may also doom her and those she loves to the whims of a vengeful supernatural being.....
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From Dust a Flame follows essentially three narratives, with the vast majority of it being told from the perspective of Hannah in first person as she is forced to discover her mother's true past, and her own Jewish heritage...as well as her own queerness.  Then there's also segments flashing back to her mother Malka's story at around the same age in 1990, as she struggled against the rules and confines of her family; and there's also a few segments flashing back to her mother's (and thus Hannah's grandmother's) time around the same age in 1939 when her parents' got her safe passage out of Prague as the Nazis took over.  Each generation sees the women struggling with circumstances bitterly, and making choices they regret even as they know they are the only ways they can think of to survive, even as the costs of those choices comes to bear on their ancestors, and this is really really well done.  

But the bulk of the story focuses upon Hannah, a girl who has struggled with so much in her life - her lack of a family to call her own who clearly loves her other than her brother, who is now set to go away to college; her lack of any social friend or romantic relationships - the one boy she tried to romance she just wound up feeling no connection to - and her struggle to work harder and harder to earn her mother's attention and praise.  And so when all this happens, and she winds up desperately going to Fox Hollow for answers, Hannah finds herself overwhelmed by a history and culture she never knew in Judaism, as well as at the same time feelings of interest in a girl for the first time in a girl Ari.  How is she supposed to take it in - to say nothing about the curse on her back that makes her unable to be free to show herself to these new family members around her?  

But Podos crafts a story that allows Hannah to find answers in ways that are tremendously satisfying, which includes just this perfect paragraph about Judaism (and about finding out that you might be queer at the same time) that I don't want to spoil; about how it's a part of you even if you're not religious, about how even as you may want to escape a small town where everyone knows you so much you feel constricted you also feel warm ties to it; and more.  And hell, it also deals with other character's issues, like Gabe's worries about how being adopted will mean to this new Jewish family which technically he doesn't belong to, or Malka's struggle with her parents' restrictions not allowing her to see a boy or go elsewhere; or Ari's struggle with her mother's refusal to let her see her grandma in her final days, such that it feels like Ari's connection with her bubbe was taken from her, etc. 

And it deals with these so so well all in a story that features Jewish folklore in a very effective and enjoyable way, featuring a golem, shedim (Jewish demons), ancient stories and invocations of the Talmud and more.  Which makes this Jewish reader really really impressed, even as non-Jewish readers will totally have no problem with Podos' explanations of it all.  

So yeah, I really really liked this book - I wouldn't quite say I loved it, as it didn't quite get there for me like some books do, where my breath is taken away by the ending, but it hits all the marks I wanted really well that I highly recommend it.  

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