A very enthusiastic 5 stars!!! This will definitely be one of my favourite novels this year. Sadness Is a White Bird is set in Israel and starts in an jail where 19 year old Jonathan is being detained. Jonathan tells his own story in the form of a lyrical narrative told to his friend Laith. Jonathan is Jewish and Laith is Palestinian. With this premise, this novel does everything a good novel is supposed to do:

-I loved how Rothman-Zecher tackles such a fraught political and historical context head on. Jonathan's own family history includes some brutal anti-Semitic losses in Greece and in the Holocaust, while Laith's family has also been brutalized by the Israeli army. With this background and in the face of Jonathan's impending military service, Jonathan, Laith and his twin sister Nimreen forge a complicated friendship.

-I loved how Rothamn-Zecher evokes what felt like real powerful emotions. Jonathan is young and his emotions have the rawness that comes with youth, but there is no gratuitous melodrama.

-I loved the interactions between Jonathan and other characters, especially with Laith and his Nimreen -- lots of smart original dialogue, including the extremes of humour and harshness.

-I loved the writing. There is no fluff here, but Rothman-Zecher manages to be both direct and very creative in his use of language, time lines and points of view.

-And I loved where I felt Rothman-Zecher was trying to take me politically and emotionally. I just finished reading Hillary Clinton's new memoir, What Happened. She ends by calling for "deep empathy", for people to work hard to understand and connect with people who are different from themselves and have different beliefs. It's not dissimilar from the message I got recently reading Van Jones' Beyond the Messy Truth: How We Came Apart, How We Come Together and Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Coming from a bicultural home in Canada, it's a message that really resonates with me. Sadness Is a White Bird read like a beautiful, powerful and painful call for deep empathy.

Rothman-Zecher is ridiculously talented. I can't wait to see what he writes next.

I could not deal with the excess of exposition in this book, and didn't get past the first few pages. I would have liked if the author had trusted us a bit more, or found another narrative mode to convey the information.