From a Sealed Room, Rachel Kadish
From a Sealed Room, Rachel Kadish
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

From a Sealed Room

Author: Rachel Kadish

Narrator: Rebecca Gibel

Unabridged: 17 hr 9 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/13/2020

Categories: Fiction, Family Life, Women


Synopsis

In this affecting, perceptive novel, Rachel Kadish reflects on the ghosts of the past, the tensions of war, and the difficult bonds of family.

When Maya enrolls at Hebrew University in Jerusalem shortly after the Gulf War, she hopes to leave New York and a fraught relationship with her mother behind her. In Israel, she gets to know her older cousin Tami, a housewife whose home has a room sealed against the war's Scud missile attacks. Like Maya, Tami feels distanced from the people closest to her—her mother, her husband, her only son. But it will ultimately be Maya's visits with Shifra, an elderly recluse and Holocaust survivor who lives in the apartment below her, that give Maya the courage to confront her problems and break free of the burdens of her past.

About Rachel Kadish

Rachel Kadish is the award-winning author of the novels The Weight of Ink, From a Sealed Room, and Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story, as well as the novella I Was Here. Her work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Ploughshares, Slate, and Tin House. She lives outside of Boston.


Reviews

I loved The Weight of Ink, the author's 2017 novel, and I read it three times (lastly for book club), so I had high hopes for this one. I was terribly disappointed, although I did not realize at first it was Kadish's debut novel. It's purely character-driven with not much of a real plot, but I could......more

I bought this book because I loved "Tolstoy Lied" by the same author. In "Tolstoy" the characters were very well developed and I truly cared for each of them. "Tolstoy Lied" was released a year after this one, but I figured "Who changes a lot in one year?" I was very wrong. "From a Sealed Room" was......more

Goodreads review by Tami

This is a challenging book to evaluate. I only liked one minor character, there was no driving plot to speak of, but it brought up so many questions. It was for bookclub, so sometimes when I’m smart, I take notes as I read so I remember the book by the time book club comes around, and this time my n......more