January 31, 2016

Goodreads genres

This is for all my friends on Goodreads as well as anyone, especially other authors, who participate in Goodreads. I just went through all My Books and reshelved them according to official Goodreads genres This was particularly important for books I've written so potential readers can find them. For example, I added France to Rashi's Daughters and changed the not-so-popular Judaica to Jewish and Judaism. I also spelled out Historical Fiction to replace hist-fict.

Now I have a favor to ask from my Goodreads fans, that is anyone who had shelved one of my books as Read, Currently Reading, or To-Be-Read. Could you please add the genres above to your shelf to describe them? Apparently Goodreads will not list any books under a particular genre unless at least two people shelve them as such, and a quick check of those who reviewed Rashi’s Daughters showed that the majority didn’t assign it to any genre. Other authors may want to alert their readers to do this for their books, and I salute those, apparently few, readers who do shelve their books according to genre.

Posted by maggie at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2016

5 Stars for Mathematician's Shiva

The Mathematician's ShivaThe Mathematician's Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Those who regularly read my Goodreads updates know I rarely give 5 star reviews. But I not only greatly enjoyed reading this book [a debut novel, no less], I found no flaws worth mentioning. Funny, poignant, clever, delightful, and exciting, with an amazing array of fascinating and fabulous characters. Nice to read a book with a heroic Jewish mother who's a genius and feminist for a change. Most authors are lucky to manage one flashback well, but Stuart Rojstaczer succeeded at taking me back and forth between past, present, and future without ever losing me along the way. I salute his writing skill and hope he won't be a one-book-wonder.

I finish by mentioning that this novel meets the foremost criteria for a book I want to read/write [small spoiler alert] - a happy, or at least satisfying, ending. Only caveat: you don't need to be Jewish or know Yiddish to appreciate this novel, but it doesn't hurt.



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Posted by maggie at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

January 25, 2016

Great article about Jewish magic

A friend forwarded me this excellent article about the prevalence of Sorcery in the ancient Middle East, as demonstrated by archaeological evidence of magic devices such as amulets and incantation bowls from the first millennium. Jewish magic items written in Aramaic with Hebrew letters have been unearthed [often literally] in every community Jews lived, from Babylonia to Egypt to Rome.

The important and accepted role of ancient Jewish magic was exactly what I portrayed in my "Rav Hisda's Daughter" historical novels, Apprentice and Enchantress. As this article concludes "one woman's magic was another woman's religion." Still true today.

Posted by maggie at 06:52 PM | Comments (0)

January 20, 2016

Latest update on new book

It has been five weeks since I last posted a progress report about my upcoming new book, but I am still not ready to "officially" announce its publication via social media. But progress is definitely happening. We have a cute, intriguing title and in my humble opinion, a clever book cover. Of course we have obtained ISBN and PCN numbers, as well as chosen appropriate BISAC subject categories HUMO 14000 [humor/religion] and REL 064000 [religion/Judaism/Talmud]. The beta version of our websites look good and I’ve written the all-important Amazon description.

The book's text has been copyedited and I approved most of the copyeditor's changes. After several emails between me and the illustrator, all the cartoons are finished to my satisfaction. Most recently, the interior designer has given me several examples of how the first ten pages, which is essentially all of chapter one, might look. Based on this I had to choose a style for all of the pages: how the cartoons should be framed; what font and frame, if any, would best suit the quotes; how to indicate Talmud section numbers; font and dingbats for page numbers.

Now comes the tricky part. Due to the complicated interior design, where 78 quotes and 17 cartoon illustrations have to be seamlessly integrated into the text of 50 Talmud discussions, it may be only a week or it may take longer until I get to see what the semifinal manuscript will look like. Then I go over it with a fine-toothed comb, as this is my last time to make changes that won’t delay the pub date or cost money to fix. Thankfully 2016 is a leap year, so I get an extra day in February for later book chores.

Posted by maggie at 06:03 PM | Comments (2)

January 14, 2016

Marriage of Opposites review

The Marriage of OppositesThe Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I enjoyed this historical novel much more than Hoffman's previous two. Her descriptions of 19th-century St. Thomas are gorgeous, blazing with so many colors that I could almost see them. The writing is excellent, and the characters compelled me to follow their stories until they linked up at the end and all secrets were revealed. I was pleased to find none of the horrors of her last novels; her descriptive skills were used to bring the wonderful locations and people to life. A caveat to readers - the protagonist is Pizzarro's mother Rachel, and the novel revolves around her rather than the artist. Which was fine with me.

This novel also made me think about how being Jewish impacted Rachel's life as well as others in her family and community. Also about how a person was either a Jew or not, no matter how much or little they observed religious traditions. Apparently leaving the faith or joining it were impossible.



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Posted by maggie at 03:33 PM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2016

Not That Jewish

Saturday night I was in the audience at the Jewish Women’s Theater to see comedian Monica Piper’s one-woman show, Not That Jewish. Monica not only writes funny stuff [she won an Emmy for the TV show Rugrats], but she is a wonderful stand-up comic. Monica excels in broad physical comedy, especially making faces, a la Lucille Ball, but her shtick is based on her life story as daughter of a traveling stand-up comic, whom she clearly adored, and her ultimately successful efforts to break into this male-centered field herself. Plus there were he unsuccessful efforts to find for herself the loving marriage her parents enjoyed. There are too many laugh-out-load moments to catalog, but there are serious themes among the jokes.

The main one, as suggested by the title, is what constitutes being Jewish. Do you have to belong to a synagogue or is having a Jewish heart sufficient? Do you have to enjoy chopped liver and substitute “sch” at the start of words you denigrate? What if you had a bar mitzvah but had been adopted as an infant whose birth mother wasn’t Jewish?

Not That Jewish ends this month, and I urge you to see it at The Braid [not The Broad] while you can.

Posted by maggie at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2016

Petersen Auto Museum

My grandsons [6 and 9] have been eager to see the Petersen Automotive Museum since they heard it has a section devoted to Pixar's Cars, so I volunteered to take them when school was out. I'd heard good things, but this was even better than I expected. The 3-floor collection of cars, many one of a kind and all immaculately preserved, was awesome, and we didn't even go into the Vault. Some were so beautiful I felt like I was at an art museum, especially on the first floor where an entire wall displayed a constantly-moving series of images that matched the ethereal music.

We were advised to start at the top 3rd floor and work our way down. Third floor is devoted to history of cars, with lots of old autos and motorcycles. There were several interactive displays the boys could do, but they really enjoyed sitting in one of the old ones for a photo op. The 2nd floor was the one they wouldn't have left except they got hungry for lunch. A large children's room has an array of interactive displays, toy cars to race and play with, and books about cars for all ages. They loved the Car-Pads, iPads for each child to use on a scavenger hunt around the 2nd floor that enabled them to design their own race car. What a fantastic activity for kids. Also there was an area where people could do X-Box type racing games where you sit in the driver's seat just like in a fancy/expensive video arcade. Boy was it difficult to get them out of there.

Nat Ben in Maserati.jpg

Nat Ben in 1906 auto.jpg

One caveat however. No food is available on the premises, but there is a family area with tables and chairs where we could eat our own lunches. It also had some small cars to play with and books for the kids. So I recommend bringing your own food.

Posted by maggie at 10:56 AM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2016

Peony review

PeonyPeony by Pearl S. Buck

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was another difficult book to rate. The writing is exquisite, which is to be expected from a Nobel Prize in literature winner. The plot is classic "happy" Chinese love story, where girl and boy end up knowing that they love each other but are unable to consummate the relationship [classic "unhappy" Chinese love story is where they die never knowing how the other felt]. But I had a hard time with how Pearl S. Buck portrayed the 19th-century Jews of Kaifeng and how their community, which had existed for 1000 years, ultimately disappeared.

I could not ignore that Buck was the daughter of Christian Missionaries, especially when she had the Jewish grandson who most resembled his devout great-grandmother saying [about Christians who wanted to use stones from the last synagogue to built their church], "They belonged to our religion, which has come to an end in this land, but their religion sprang from ours. Let them keep the stones." True Kaifeng's last rabbi died between 1800-1810, and that Jewish community never recovered, but Judaism did not, and has not, come to an end in China. And surely the author knew that. Also I cannot imagine a Jew, even an assimilated Chinese one, speaking so kindly of Christianity when the story makes it clear that pogroms were happening in the West and it was not safe for Jewish merchants to travel there.

Peony's copyright is dated 1948, which means it was written before the State of Israel was founded, likely during the Holocaust. Did the author think European Jewry was coming to an end and want to compare this horrific demise to the gentler fate of Chinese Jews? Or perhaps, like most Americans, she had no knowledge of the death camps, and the timing of this novel's publication is a strange, thought-provoking, coincidence.

Back to my review. My first reason for not giving 5 stars was that the first third is too long and the last third too short. The scenes in Peking take place too quickly considering their importance in how the book ends. Also I was annoyed by Buck's portrayal of the dissolute rabbi's son, who seemed completely extraneous to the story. All the Chinese characters were kind and good, except for the Chief Steward, whose behavior was integral to the plot. Even the chief bandit wasn't so bad.



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Posted by maggie at 09:43 PM | Comments (0)