The Birth of a Paperback…

Until the age of ten, Abby Sher was a happy child in a fun-loving, musical family. But when her father and favorite aunt pass away, Abby fills the void of her loss with rituals: kissing her father’s picture over and over each night, washing her hands, counting her steps, and collecting sharp objects that she thinks could harm innocent pedestrians. Then she begins to pray. At first she repeats the few phrases she remem-bers from synagogue, but by the time she is in high school, Abby is spending hours locked in her closet, urgently reciting a series of incantations and pleas. If she doesn’t, she is sure someone else will die, too. The patterns from which she cannot deviate become her shelter and her obsession.
In college Abby is diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and while she accepts this as an explanation for the counting and kissing and collecting, she resists labeling her fiercest obsession, certain that her prayers and her relationship with G-d are not an illness but the cure. She also discovers a new passion: performing comedy. She is never happier than when she dons a wig and makes people laugh. Offstage, however, she remains unable to confront the fears that drive her. She descends into darker compulsions, starving and cutting herself, measuring every calorie and incision. It is only when her earliest, deepest fear is realized that Abby is forced to examine and redefine the terms of her faith and her future.

Amen, Amen, Amen is an elegy honoring a mother, father, and beloved aunt who filled a child with music and their own blend of neuroticism. It is an adventure, full of fast cars, unsolved crimes, and close calls. It is part detective story, part love story, about Abby’s hunt for answers and someone to guide her to them. It is a young woman’s radiant and heartbreaking account of struggling to recognize the bounds and boundlessness of obsession and devotion.

Told in episodic verse Family is a YA novel that is a fictionalized exploration of cult dynamics, loosely based on the Manson Family murders of 1969. It is an unflinching look at people who are born broken, and the myriad of ways in which they try, over and over, to make themselves whole again.

Despite his dreams of hipster rock glory, Ari Abramson’s band, the Tribe, is more white bread than indie-cred. Made up of four suburban teens from a wealthy Jewish school, their Mötley Crüe is about as hardcore as SAT prep and scripture studies.

But after a one-song gig at a friend’s Bar Mitzvah—a ska cover of “Hava Nagilah”—the Tribe’s popularity erupts overnight. Now, Ari is forced to navigate a minefield of inflated egos, misplaced romance, and the shallowness of indie-rock elitism. It’s a hard lesson in the complex art of playing it cool.
So Punk Rock is…

a 2010 Sydney Taylor Notable Book for Teen Readers

“Awesome. Brilliant. Hilarious. So Punk Rock is so good!”
—Blake Nelson, author of Girl

“A downright hilarious read.”—Elizabeth Bird, author of School Library Journal’s A Fuse #8 Production

“[A] cutting-edge prose-graphic hybrid. . .smart, laugh-out-loud witty.”—Cynthia Leitich Smith, author of Tantalize and Eternal

A Booklist Top 10 Arts Books for Youth (2009) and Top 10 Religious Books for Youth (2009).

For more information, visit: www.kosherpunkrock.com.

From Booklist — She was christened Delphine, but—strong-minded in this and other things as well—she chose to call herself Finny, and this is the story of some 20 or so formative years of her life, from age 14 to (roughly) 34. That not all of these years are presented consecutively—Kramon skips over high school and a cluster of years in Finny’s twenties and early thirties—lends a not unattractive episodic and even wistful air to this first novel of emotional development, disappointment, and, perhaps, fulfillment. A clutch of eccentric characters evidences Kramon’s fondness for Dickens, and the frequent allusions to Finny’s future (of the years later she would realize sort) salute Dickens’ sentimentality, as well. For the reader, this invites both a parallel nostalgia for that future and an air of the inevitable to Finny’s sometimes unhappy experiences. This mood impacts Kramon’s characters, too, whose actions sometimes seem more imposed than organic. Not a perfect book, therefore, but one that is suffused with tenderness and the promise of good things for the author’s future. –Michael Cart