V It is the eve of Beatriz de Luna’s 12th birthday and her mind is filled with fashionable clothes, party entertainers and presents. But church-going Beatriz’s biggest birthday surprise is the revelation that she is Jewish. And in 16th-century Portugal, that means danger. Beatriz’s struggle to come to terms with her new identity is well portrayed, and will speak to 21st-century readers. But the story soon moves on to her adulthood, when Beatriz (concealing her Jewish name, Gracia Nasi), is married to a wealthy merchant, who is also a converso (hidden Jew) – and part of a network helping captured conversos escape the Inquisition. The Girl with the Secret Name by Yael Zoldan (Green Bean Books, £12.99), with its tapestried backdrop of 16th-century Europe, has the historical and emotional heft of Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait and the immediacy of contemporary YA, and will bring the (fictionalised) story of a real-life Jewish feminist heroine to a wider teen and YA readership.
For young ones who are reluctant to get out of bed on these winter mornings, Jennifer Tzivia MacLeod’s Baila the Klopper (Kar-Ben, £14.99) will sound the right note. Pre-alarm clock, the klopper would summon the community to morning prayer by tapping on their doors and chanting. Shirley Waisman’s illustrations show an entertaining variety of weary expressions on the faces of villagers awoken by Baila (check out the droopy-eyelidded goat). Bagels, from charred to sublimely chewy, play a key part in the story and the human characters also have an endearing roundness. Age up to six.
There is an heirloom feel to Pandora and the Story Forge by Gaynor Andrews, illustrated by Marie-Alice Harel (Rocket Bird Books, £12.99). Pandora hoards words, forges them, mixes and bakes them, spins them into blankets and tales for children, who themselves become writers. Harel makes spellbinding use of graphics, weaving words into the peachy-toned fairytale illustrations, and the magic is reinforced by printing the rhyming text in a calligraphic font. An unusual gift book for age up to seven.
In Rachel Lynn Solomon’s enemies-to-lovers romance Past Present Future and its sequel Tonight Tomorrow (Simon & Schuster, £8.99) Rowan and Neil, both mainstream Jewish, meet at school and attempt a long-distance relationship at university. They inhabit a world of JSocs, Friday-night dinners and casual antisemitism that will feel more familiar to UK readers than most happy-go-lucky Jewish American YA.
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