I genuinely wanted to love this book. This story revolves around a man looking back at his childhood school experience. He remarks about its toxicity, especially in relation to students of Jewish faith. This is not an original story at all, but with the rise of the "dark academia" obsession, this book meets a lot of strong details related to the dark genre. Though the descriptions were detailed and thoughtful, I found the story to be incredibly slow. I was often left wanting more. I will say that many people, especially those who might relate more to the story, might gain something more from the book that I have.

I reviewed this for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis.

https://www.startribune.com/review-antiquities-by-cynthia-ozick/600046706/

This novella about an elderly trustee of a defunct prep school where he now lives is written in an "old" style which took some getting used to. I really liked reading about the present day reality of living in a crumbling school but I was not as engaged in his reminiscing about his uncle's Egyptian travels and his relationship with a somewhat mysterious, slightly older, Jewish boy when he was a student at the school.

The author does a great job of writing in a very old-fashioned style, one more suited the books my parents and grandparents read rather than modern literature. That's not a bad thing, just a caution for those looking for a zippy read: this will take time to digest.

Looking back over his long association with the Temple Academy for Boys, as a student and then as a trustee, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie takes his time getting to the meat of his story. There are meanderings around the life of the school, his family's connections to Sir Flinders Petrie, how the trustees work, his Remington and myriad other topics, while we want to get to his friendship with Ben-Zion Elephantine. When Ben-Zion appears, it's still very much overshadowed by the rest of Lloyd's memoir, and how that friendship was ruptured doesn't appear to play as big a role in the written story as we're led to believe.

Another quibble is that phrase "the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school's ethos" in the blurb. It's not subtle!

eARC provided by publisher via Netgalley.

I’m judging a 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

“Though well advanced in age myself, I am the younger, and the least infirm but for a tremor of the left hand, yet capable enough, at my Remington despite long years of dependence on my secretary, Miss Margaret Stimmer (now deceased).” this comes early on in the text, but shouldn’t that be how it is?—the thing that grabs one to read further is early…