Wow. Wow. Wow.

Beautiful language, beautiful story line, beautiful, complex characters. It's a political book, of course it is, but not in the way that you're hit over the head with the politics of it all. It's beautifully written to capture the messiness and confusion of living as part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

There's a fair number of reviews here complaining about the amount of Hebrew and Arabic in the text, and I want to point out that those lines (in addition to the Ladino/Judeo-Spanish) are always translated into English, so it's not like you need to know those languages to understand the book. Don't let that scare you off if you don't know those languages- you don't need to.