Misophonia

A Jewish German teen gets caught up in her family’s drama in Vowinckel’s ambitious if uneven debut. In summer 2023, Margarita, 15, is visiting her maternal grandparents in Chicago, where she spends most of her time repulsed by her grandmother’s terrible cooking and pining for a boy back in Berlin. Her father, Avi, an Israeli who moved to Germany to serve as a cantor before she was born, has sent her to Chicago to practice English and foster her relationship with her grandparents even though Marsha, their daughter and Margarita’s mother, abandoned her and Avi more than a decade earlier. Margarita is blindsided when the adults decide to send her to Jerusalem, where Marsha is on a fellowship. Marsha fails to show up at the airport, leaving Margarita unattended for a night. The novel begins with fast-paced chapters that abruptly alternate between Margarita’s and her father’s points of view, but it gains substance when Avi shows up in Israel. There, tempers flare as nonobservant Marsha mocks Avi’s piety and excoriates his decision to stay in Germany, where antisemitism remains rife, while Margarita takes her mother’s criticism of Germany personally (“It’s not like I want to be German,” she tells her mother. “I just am”). Readers will appreciate this nuanced look into a Jewish family’s divisions. (May)