This is one busy book! There's enough plot here for three novels. At its heart, though, it's the story of Sheldon Horowitz, who is 12 when readers first meet him and soon to become an orphan after his father is murdered (his mother died a year earlier). Sheldon survives the atrocity with a new purpose in life: to exact revenge for his father's death. Meanwhile, he is sent to Hartford to live with his widowed Uncle Nate and older cousins Abe and Mirabelle, whose stories are also expansively told. Abe o embodies one of the book's major themes, the struggle against anti-Semitism a firebrand, furiously familiar with the endemic anti-Semitism of the time, the late 1930s and early 1940s. Sheldon, now 15, steals a suitcase full of money (it's complicated) and ultimately winds up with a new life in New York. This only scratches the surface of this incident-rich, coming-of-age novel rhaps too incident-rich, since the lives of Abe and Mirabelle tend to divert attention from Sheldon's story. Nevertheless, the story is compelling and deeply satisfying.

With the Nazi threat as backdrop, a series of family tragedies, criminal violence, and antisemitic acts animate this New England–set prequel to Miller's debut, Norwegian by Night (2012).A year after small-town Jewish boy Sheldon Horowitz's mother and aunt were killed in a theater fire, his father is killed when a truck runs his vehicle off the road. Twelve-year-old Sheldon, who survives the crash, is convinced it was no accident. Even after moving from rural Massachusetts to Hartford to live with his widowed uncle, he is determined to track down the murderous driver and avenge his father's death. Just how capable this introspective boy is of vengeance (and how shaken he is by the deaths in his family) is revealed when he sets fire to his house to frame as arsonists the Jew-hating siblings who, as salesmen for his father's pelt business, stole from him. At the behest of his best (and only Jewish) friend, Lenny Bernstein, Sheldon escapes to a Jewish resort in upstate New York, where he gets a job as a bellhop and becomes perilously involved in a case of stolen jewels, and Lenny sets his sights on becoming successful as a confrontational stand-up comic. Sheldon's older cousin Abe, obsessed with disproving the weak Jewish stereotype, takes a darker path. After his father, an accountant at the Colt Armory, is set up to take the fall for a bunch of missing guns, Abe exacts revenge on his father's boss. He then escapes to Canada to join the Royal Canadian Air Force with hopes of killing Nazis. There's a lot to enjoy in this sprawling book, which brings a Huck Finn–ish humor to its coming-of-age story. But with its overstated themes and tendency to dictate the characters' thoughts and feelings rather than elicit them, the novel compromises its emotional impact.A novel whose entertaining parts don't make for a satisfying whole.

This terrific coming-of-age story, a prequel to Miller-s Norwegian by Night, follows Sheldon Horowitz from his parents- deaths before his 13th birthday in 1937 to his departure a decade later from the isolated New England village where he and Lenny Bernstein, his best friend and the only other Jewish kid he knows, lead lives largely sheltered from both anti-Semitism and Jewish culture. Sheldon, a tough kid with outdoor skills cultivated during a childhood spent hunting and trapping with his father, a shell-shocked WWI vet, decides, correctly, that the accident that killed his dad as they drove home from his mother-s funeral was murder, and devotes his teen years to seeking vengeance while living with an uncle. This quest spirals into grimly entertaining capers, including a jewel heist in the burgeoning borscht belt resorts of the Catskills. Diverting subplots track America-s entry into WWII and the birth of modern stand-up comedy, as shown by Lenny-s hilarious forays into showbiz. Readers will root for Sheldon, a memorable survivor, every step of the way. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (July)