Deborah Green is a woman of passionate contradictions, a rabbi who craves goodness and surety while wrestling with her own desires and with the sorrow and pain she sees around her. Her life changes when she visits the hospital room of Henry Friedman, an older man who has attempted suicide. His parents were murdered in the Holocaust when he was a child, and all his life he's struggled with difficult questions. Deborah's encounter with Henry and his family draws her into a world of tragedy, frailty, love, and, finally, hope.
"In shimmering prose and with uncommon empathy, Rosen creates a cast of characters plagued by profound spiritual crises.... Not since Saul Bellow has an American novelist created characters so unabashedly determined to unleash their souls, to burst their spirit's sleep."
Andrew Furman, The Miami Herald
"Rosen's charming yet serious novel--the Jewish equivalent in style, smarts, and topicality to Anna Quindlen's and Kent Haruf's bestselling morality tales----grapples with nothing less than the endless conflicts between human nature and our perception of God, the intellect and the emotions, religion and science, the past and the present....Rosen's radiant novel is a welcoming and satisfying inquiry into matters of inheritance, compassion, faith, and free will."
Donna Seaman, Newsday
"Rosen...offers a rare and vibrant portrait of a contemporary rabbi who is Reform, female, and complex....What is not predictable is how well the novel itself negotiates the balance between the spiritual and the comic."
