The Forbidden Book

• Author: Sacha Lamb
• Genre: YA Fantasy
• Publication Date: October 1, 2024
• Publisher: Levine Querido

Thank you to NetGalley and Levine Querido for providing me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Dybbuks.

Illegal printing.

A genderqueer lesbian with a knife.

Set against a backdrop of literary censorship and growing Jewish political consciousness, Sydney Taylor and Stonewall award-winning Sacha Lamb’s sophomore novel is a soaring exploration of identity, survival, and ultimately, hope.

On the night before her wedding, 17-year-old Sorel leaps from a window and runs away from her life. To keep from being discovered, she takes on the male identity of Isser Jacobs — but it soon becomes clear that there is a real Isser Jacobs, and people want him dead. Her mistaken identity takes Sorel into the dark underworld of her small city in the Pale of Settlement, where smugglers, forgers, and wicked angels fight for control of the Jewish community. In order to make it out, Sorel must discover who Isser Jacobs really is — and who she wants to be.

I couldn’t possibly love When the Angels Left the Old Country more than I did after discovering it as an ARC. However, that book left my expectations super high for Lamb’s latest book, and while it wasn’t a bad story, it didn’t fully live up to my expectations.

Simply the idea of a book set in the Pale of Settlement featuring dybbuks, illegal printing, and a genderqueer lesbian with a knife was enough to make me want to read this book. Dybbuks are souls that have unfinished business, and can possess people in an attempt to wrap up the loose ends of their life that are causing them to not move onto the world to come. In case you aren’t familiar with the Pale of Settlement, it was basically a huge ghetto spanning parts of the Russian Empire for Jewish people to be limited to. Most Jews were poor because they were restricted from most trades and couldn’t own property, farm, or trade with gentiles, and experienced pogroms by gentiles and the police themselves. The example that most people will be most familiar with is the setting from Fiddler on the Roof, which was set in the Pale of Settlement. 

While there were some factors that didn’t work for me, I want to share my favorite thing about this book—its overt Jewishness. My grandfather lived in the Pale of Settlement, and I was so intrigued not only to picture what it looked like, but to get to see the dark underside of the shtetl (village), as opposed to Fiddler’s heavy emphasis on people who were just living their lives and abiding by the rules. The idea of dybbuks has been around in Jewish mysticism since medieval times, while the changing political climate and growing interest in the chapbooks printed and distributed makes me think that this was a later development. 

The majority of the characters are Jewish, and there is a biased education system reflective of Russia’s longstanding suppression of Jewish communities. Children were required to attend Russian schools, unless they could sponsor some other child to attend the Russian school and allow their own to attend a yeshiva, or Jewish school, where they’d learn Hebrew and more about Jewish history, customs, and practices. The Jewishness of this book just feels so natural and realistic—so many characters quietly say the blessing for anything they consume, like observant Jews do in regular life to this day. However, the Jewishness isn’t overwhelming: Jewish mysticism and folklore inform the plot, but it isn’t so much to the point where someone who isn’t familiar with Jewishness wouldn’t be able to understand what is happening in the story.

Whenever I’m reading a book, I always want to see growth in the character. And since there was so much of that growth in When the Angels Left the Old Country, I was kind of expecting something that gets to dive deep into the characters and the story itself. However, the idea is fantastic but fell a little flat for me in execution. I was disappointed to see that the characters in this book weren’t as well-rendered, and they came across as relatively flat.

Dybbuk stories have been present in Jewish folklore, and the most recent one I read was The City Beautiful by Aden Polydoros. Between that book and Lamb’s prior book, I’m sure you can understand why my expectations were sky-high. The dybbuk aspect of this book was one of my favorite elements, and how it contributed to the mystery. Even the magic in this story just felt natural, the way that it was threaded through the whole book—the possession, the nature of the titular forbidden book, and some unusual dreams were all central to the story, and it never felt forced. 

Overall, this left me feeling as though there wasn’t enough book to fully flesh everything out, yet the story was rushed and didn’t feel like every loose end got tied up in a satisfying way. Despite the things that I didn’t love about this book, the fact that it was such a Jewish story kept me reading it. I did really love the setting of the story, and it was written so well that I could easily picture the places the characters were going to. While this wasn’t my favorite of the Lamb books that I’ve read, I’m still really curious to see what they’ve got in store for us, and I will absolutely be checking out their next book as well. This might be a good fit for you if you like historical fiction, Jewish stories, reading books where romance doesn’t overshadow the story itself, stories featuring queer characters, a good mystery, or even learning about some Jewish folklore and mysticism.

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