Rebecca Podos' Jewish fantasy novel From Dust, a Flame follows teenage Hannah on a mission to find her mom and learn more about her heritage. She loves her brother, but everything seems to come easy for him, everyone likes him right away, and even his relationship with their mom is better than Hannah's. She works for everything to scrape up the best grades so that she'll be noticed by a good school and get a good, six-figure job. Then, on her 17th birthday, she wakes up with snake-like eyes. The next day, she wakes up with fangs and her mom disappears to get help. After 6 weeks go by, Hannah and her brother go looking for their mom. Hannah learns more about her mom's past and her heritage than she ever could have imagined. But her mom is in danger and she must use Jewish stories--stories she thought could only be myth--to save her family for good. The characters are interesting, and the fantastical elements are done beautifully, but I found it difficult to get through. The sense of urgency/tension was not totally there.

I am always so desperate for Jewish-centered YA that isn't Holocaust-focused/historical fiction. This absolutely checks that box. From Dust, A Flame is inspired by Jewish folklore and mythology. I grew up being read the story of the Golem in a children's book, so seeing that here made me feel so nostalgic. And I loved learning more about Jewish mysticism since that was something I wasn't raised with.

I just wish this book had been written better. It was pretty clumsy, and I don't just mean the ARC typos. It felt pretty cringy at times, and way too self-aware. There's a moment where the main character is arguing with her brother and she thinks "Why am I making this an argument for no reason?" Well, for the plot, of course, dear Hannah!

All-in-all, I just feel fuzzy knowing we're getting even a tiny bit more Jewishness in YA and YA fantasy. I have been asking for it for YEARS and will continue to beg for books like this one.

I think this book is forever going to hold a place in my heart. I’m so grateful to have been able to read it early and I’m so excited for everyone else to experience it on March 8! Filled with family, Jewish folklore, and a spell-binding mystery, From Dust, A Flame is really something special.⁣
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Hannah and Gabe Williams have never spent too long in one place. Whenever their mom, Malka, gets the urge to move, they go where the wind takes them. They don’t know much about Malka’s life before having children, and aren’t aware of any family on their mom’s side. Malka has always been mysterious. ⁣
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But when Hannah wakes up on the morning of her seventeenth birthday with the eyes of a snake, Malka knows that something from her past has caught up to them. Promising to get help, she disappears. Every morning Hannah wakes up to a new mutation, and every day her confusion and worry grows. Days turn into weeks, and Hannah and Gabe decide they can’t just wait around. ⁣
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They discover long-lost family, a Jewish heritage that dates back hundreds of years, and a curse that has finally come due. Rebecca Podos has woven an incredibly relevant coming-of-age story, combined with a legacy of survival, stories from the Holocaust, magical Jewish folklore, and a mystery that ties all the pieces together. The ambiance of this book was so rich and steeped in history, and the writing was lyrical and profound. The themes of family and love resonated right down to my soul.⁣
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In addition to the Jewish aspects, From Dust, a Flame also explores issues around sexuality, adoption, gender identity, and so much more. This book at once feels incredibly current, and completely timeless. The characters were so well-developed and real, that I felt like I knew them. I especially appreciated the brother-sister relationship, which felt very accurate, and the depiction of parents as flawed people, just doing their best. ⁣
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This is the kind of book that I wish I had when I was a teen, but I’m so thankful that these stories exist now. From Dust, A Flame is going to stick with me for a long, long time.

I really wanted to absolutely fall in love with this one (I have an inclination for books with Jewish characters and culture, and any book that quotes R. Huna is going to automatically have me dancing in my seat a bit) but it just...didn't gel for me. The writing was great, the relationship between Hannah and Gabe was beautifully done, and I loved the way that the story was based on lesser known Jewish mythology. But I didn't really feel like the story connected for me emotionally, and I was let down a bit by the secondary characters - it didn't seem that there was much differentiation among the the family especially, which made it hard to feel like an effective coming home/reunion/relationship building story - and the golem element felt somewhat underbaked. There were also a couple of nitpicks in terms of Jewish stuff - non-family members pay shiva calls rather than sitting shiva, the Hebrew was backward in every instance, you wouldn't say "in the same Talmud" but instead something like "in the same tractate" or "on the same daf," plus it was pretty hard to pinpoint the Eggers family religiously/denominationally when they were seemingly Conservative but the non-Malka daughters were always in long skirts and everyone was going to Stern, a distinctly Orthodox/Modern Orthodox school - but more than anything I was confused by the setting, which felt very atmospheric and fitting for the story but didn't read in a way that made sense to me from a Jewish perspective (a kosher bakery in some random upstate town?? Are you paying the ashgiach to live there?).

Overall, it's a good book, but missed greatness for me - perhaps because of a lack of expectation management?

Hannah, along with her mother and older brother, Gabe, have moved around almost constantly throughout her life, until Hannah convinces her mother to settle down for a short time so that Hannah can attend a prestigious prep school in Boston. As a soon-to-be senior, Hannah has her life planned out before her - prestigious high school to prestigious college to prestigious job - and she works harder than anyone knows to ensure that her future will turn out perfectly. She knows little of her mother and little of her own family's past until her family's past comes for her. On the morning of her seventeenth birthday, plain and unassuming Hannah Williams wakes up with golden eyes. Her mother leaves Hannah and Gabe, promising to find a solution, and disappears. Six weeks later, a mysterious letter sends the sister and brother duo on a mission that will take them straight into the heart of their family's haunted past.

This book was a gorgeous exploration of self-discovery, familial identity, generational trauma, grief, and love. It was also a brilliant work of YA contemporary Jewish fantasy. As a reader, one of the most important things to me is the characters, and the character development was really well done. Each of the characters experience growth and come out better at the end of the book. Most of the book is told from Hannah's perspective, but there are flashback chapters that tell the story of Hannah's mother and grandmother from their own perspectives. These flashbacks added to the story and helped the reader to connect the past to the present.

Overall, this book was a pleasure to read. I recommend it to anyone who is searching for a story with strong, queer characters and contemporary fantasy elements. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing an eARC!

From Dust, a Flame is a book about a girl who wakes up one day with golden eyes, and whose mother leaves to find a way to fix it. It is about family and secrets and different transformations every day. It is a story about stories, about how tragedy ripples through generations, about monsters that are metaphors and monsters that are real.

The book is also about Judaism, about the Holocaust, about Jewish demons and ghosts. Hannah, our protagonist, descends from a long line of Jewish scholars and Rabbis, though she doesn't know this at the beginning.

"It's weird to say a religion is about more than God, but that feels true. It's, like, a shared history, and it belongs to me, and it belongs to you, even if you never knew about it until now."

As someone who grew up knowing I was Jewish, but in a different, looser way than many of my peers, Hannah's experience mirrors my own. (Discounting the golden eyes and claws and wings, of course.) This book felt personal in a way that few do — I could be Hannah, and Hannah could be me.

But Hannah's story is not our only one. Interwoven are flashbacks to when things began to fall apart: both in pre-WWII Czechoslovakia and 1990s Fox Hollow, New York.

"The past has teeth, Jitkala. It may catch you if you turn your back on it."

This book was a perfect blend of contemporary fantasy, historical fiction, coming of age, Jewish folklore, and queer awakening. Though there were some small flaws that lowered my rating to a 4.5/5, From Dust, a Flame is a heartfelt and touching book that I will be thinking about for a long time.

(I would like to note that any quotes I use may be changed or cut by the final book, as I read an early review copy.)

I don’t remember exactly how I came to have a review copy of From Dust, a Flame. I mean, I know it came from Netgalley, but I don’t remember requesting it. It was just on my Kindle one day, with its dark and foreboding romantic cover, and I once again dove into a book with no memory of the blurb.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover Rebecca Podos’s fourth book isn’t the Hunger Games-adjacent drama-and-action-and-drama fest the cover implies. (I love a dystopian YA, but it’s been, you know, a time, and I’m very tired.)

From Dust, a Flame by Rebecca Podos is a young adult contemporary Jewish fantasy novel about how trauma gets passed through generations of parents imperfectly protecting their children. Most of the action revolves around primary source research, most of the drama is familial, and the romantic subplot is sapphic. It’s what I call a “nice story”--not free from conflict or trauma, but thoughtful about how it portrays them and full of characters who are trying their best to do right by each other, even when they make mistakes.

The main character, Hannah Williams, will resonate with readers who recognized themselves in Encanto’s super strong, hyper capable Luisa (me; I bawled my eyes out). Even though Hannah and her family have not spent more than a year in the same district since she started school, Hannah is a perfect student. She sacrifices sleep, free time, hobbies, and friendships in order to maintain her perfect grades.

Hannah has this sense of herself as someone who isn’t naturally gifted in any way, and therefore has to strive four times as hard as her peers in order to earn the love that flows naturally to the rest of her family:

“Nobody can help loving my brother, but I don’t need anyone to love me like that. I just need to be good enough that they can’t help but sit up and notice me … sometimes, it feels like no student-of-the-mother award or A++ essay or glowing teacher’s recommendation could make Mom pay me her full attention.”

Hannah’s mother and older brother, Gabe, are eccentric, extroverted artist types. It’s Hannah’s mother’s wanderlust that keeps the family in constant motion along “a trail of borrowed houses that had been winding its way across the country for years.” It’s Gabe’s grew-up-too-fast emotional maturity that keeps them relatively peaceful anyway.

When Hannah’s mother was seventeen, she ran away from “a black farmhouse besieged on all sides by wildflowers.”

The night before Hannah’s seventeenth birthday, her mother gives her a silver pendant:

“‘A hamsa. It was from a friend of your grandmother’s … Someone who meant a lot to me growing up.’

“… We’ve never met our grandmother on Mom’s side, never met any of her relatives. Mom rarely talks about the people or place she comes from, or anything that happened to her before [she met our deceased father]. I’ve never even seen a picture of her as a kid …”

There are Stars of David engraved in the tip of each of the hamsa’s fingers. It’s the first time Hannah learns her mother’s family is Jewish–that she is Jewish.

What exactly that means is a recurring theme throughout From Dust, a Flame. As Hannah learns more about her family history, she meets Jewish people with a wide range of beliefs and practices, from atheists to mystics. Podos is clearly trying to balance Judaism for Goyim (“This is how we celebrate, this is how we mourn,” etc.) with more in-group-oriented discussions about Jewish identity.

Since I’m not Jewish, I can’t really say how well she pulls it off, but I could tell how meaningful a project it was for her, and I am always won over by authorial earnestness.

The morning after Hannah opens the hamsa, she wakes up with “impossible golden eyes, and horizontal, knife-slit pupils.”

I was like “Hell yeah, werewolves,” but unfortunately this is not a werewolf book. When Hannah wakes up the next morning, the not-werewolf eyes are gone, and she has another animal feature. It’s a painless transformation that happens every night while she is asleep, and it’s only ever the one feature.

Gabe’s adamant about taking Hannah to a doctor. He’s a big fan of horror movies, so I don’t know why he would think that was a good idea, but his mother talks him out of it. She says she knows “a specialist” back home. She’ll go and find this person, Gabe and Hannah will stay alone in the apartment for two weeks at the most, and everything will be just fine.

Unsurprisingly, everything is not just fine. Their mother never returns, and Hannah ropes Gabe into going after her with only a mysterious piece of mail that arrived after her disappearance to guide them.

As I read about Hannah and Gabe digging through the layers of trauma and mistakes that formed them, I was really impressed by how Podos managed to craft such thorough and well-rounded arcs for so many characters in such a comparatively short book. Even when I disagreed with the choices characters made, I fully understood and empathized with the reasons they made them. It felt true to my experience of inherited trauma: Most people do the best they can to protect their children, but their scars get passed down anyway.

The only aspect of From Dust, a Flame that didn’t work for me was the way the final conflict was resolved. I liked the outcome, but I thought too much of the getting-there happened offscreen. It felt like it was geared toward a much younger audience than the seventeen-year-old protagonist would suggest.

Overall, though, I loved this quiet little book. At a time in my life where everything feels like it’s falling apart, I found the themes of grief and inherited trauma salient and comforting.

Plus, I cannot resist gay tryhards with mommy issues, and Podos gave me not one but four of them to love. I’m hoping she will also give me a sequel with Gabe as the protagonist because I love him and I want to see him thriving in college.

Thank you to Balzer + Bray and NetGalley for this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Hannah and older brother, Gabe, live with their mother, Malka, and are constantly moving from home rental to home rental. That is, until Hannah finds a school she really likes and will help her get ready for college in Boston. They have lived there for two years, longer than anywhere else. On the morning of Hannah’s 17th birthday, she wakes up with gold snake-like eyes. Her mother doesn’t seem to be surprised by the transformation and tells Hannah and Gabe that she knows a special healer who can help. Malka says she’ll only be gone a few days. As the days turn into weeks and months, Hannah awakes each morning with different monstrous characteristics. One day, Hannah gets a mysterious envelope in the mail with an obituary for the grandmother they never knew they had. Gabe and Hannah decide to travel to New York for their grandmother’s shiva, the Jewish period of mourning, and to learn about their family and, hopefully, find a cure for Hannah’s curse.
There are not a plethora of Jewish mysticism and fantasy books out there so when I heard about this one, I pounced. I grew up reading Judy Blume and Chaim Potok as my source of Jewish stories. Now granted, this story could not have been told in the 80’s, but even now, you would be hard pressed to find one that works. Though mostly told from Hannah’s POV, there are a few flashback chapters about Malka when she was Hannah’s age as well as Jitka’s, the grandmother, life in Czechoslovakia just before she leaves on the Kindertransport to escape the Nazis. The characters are well developed and we see Hannah has some time to develop a romantic relationship with new friend Ari (female). I really enjoyed reading this book and would recommend it for grade 9 and up.
#FromDustAFlame #NetGalley

Thank you so much to Netgalley and Rebecca Podos for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

“Judaism is more than religion, you know. More even than ritual and tradition. It’s family… We are all the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and of Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca, and Leah. We are all united by the actions and sacrifices and the covenant of our ancestors. We were all born into the ancient story of our people, which still unfolds today. Know this, and everything else can be learned.”

A riveting and layered YA sapphic fantasy filled to the brim with Jewish folklore and history. This is a story about family, identity, isolation, truth, and culture. But most importantly, this is a story about stories. And how important it is to know your own.

This book wonderfully discusses the danger of repressing your burdens and the importance of openly sharing familial history and culture. By displaying the timelines of three descending generations of women and illustrating the trauma they endure, the fear they live by, and the burdens they carry (physical and conceptual), this book is able to demonstrate the effects of generational trauma. It shows how the weight we carry from our ancestors is not chosen, but lives in us regardless, and that we must pass down our culture and our stories and our knowledge because that is how cycles are broken and damage can be confronted. It also portrays the feelings of isolation one can feel when cut off from their loved ones through forced distance, through fear, and through lack of communication and the trauma and loss that can occur when one isn't connected with their family.

My favorite part of this work was how jam-packed it is with Jewish stories and mythology. It offers up a conversation about the way stories literally and metaphorically weave and influence our history and culture. It asks us to question what we accept as truth and what could be possible. Something about the way this book is written made me genuinely believe in its lore. It encourages an open mind and a willingness to learn, and now I can’t wait to go pick up some non-fiction books about Jewish lore to gain even more knowledge about my own culture.

Additionally, I just love Gabe. He’s the best older brother of all time.

TW: underage drinking, blood, parental abandonment, death of family members (grandmother to MC during plot of book offscreen, other family members in flashback mention), grief, discussion and portrayal of WWII/The Holocaust, anti-semitism (theme), death by starvation (offscreen, mention), child death (mention), injury, violence, confinement, kidnapping

A masterpiece work of Jewish folklore and fantasy. I myself being Jewish learned so much about my own religion and culture. Podos does a phenomenal job creating relationships both blood and found. And also posing and answering the question of what it means to be Jewish. I absolutely loved this book and was delighted to finally see fantasy/sapphic/jewish representation.

I love books that start off as this slow, creeping thing and then blows up into something totally unexpected. From Dust, a Flame is so intentional in its writing, with the author providing key hints throughout that all come together in the last act perfectly. It features 3 different timelines with two in particular taking up the majority of the story. And all three of these timelines come together seamlessly.

The characters were great as well! I liked the main character, Hannah, and her brother Gabe the most. Their relationship was sweet and you really feel how close they are within the first few pages. I adored her love interest as well and their relationship growth throughout was nice. Honestly, all of the relationships in this book were compelling because there was so much history and secrets between almost everyone.

So this story is heavily inspired by Jewish folklore and mysticism. It was so cool to learn (right along with the MC) these different pieces of that folklore. By the end of the first chapter, I knew I'd love this. I had two minor complaints keeping me from giving this a full 5 stars: 1) the pacing in this book is pretty quick mostly, but it did slow down a bit in the middle and I found myself wanting to get some answers a bit faster and 2) I wish we got more of the golem! I loved them! I imagine if this was a series, we'd (somehow) get more of them. I just loved seeing their character progress and become more human the longer they were around the group. And learning previous stories of the past and how they connected to the golem was one of my favorite parts of the story!

This is a beautiful sapphic Jewish fantasy novel! I loved reading about Hannah. I also adored Hannah’s relationship with her brother Gabe.

I reviewed this for Booklist magazine and it will be published in a future issue, most likely in February closer to the book's publication date.

Don't sleep on this contemporary exploration of Jewish identity and culture with amazing LGBTQ+ representation. The added dose of mythos and magic to this is *chef's kiss* perfection.

I received a copy of this ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Wonderful book! Initially I thought I had this whole book figured out, but it took so many twists and turns that I had not expected. I truly loved that it defied my expectations.

I don't always find that multiple POVs work, but as these were spread out in three distinct eras, it worked.

The last half/three quarters of this book were especially gripping, and after reaching the halfway point I read the rest of the book in just a few hours.

I believe there are hints at the end of the book for a sequel, and I sincerely hope one is in the works.

The Good: The plot summary of From Dust, A Flame sounds promising - Hannah and her family are always on the move, but lately things for Hannah are stable and hopeful. Until a sudden transformation forces Hannah to investigate her mother's past. Connections to Jewish myth and legend abound.
The Bad: Pretty much everything else. Once Hannah transforms, her mother leaves in search of "an expert" to help while refusing to explain anything other than that the family is Jewish. Each day Hannah transforms differently, though the forms listed (horns, claws, long and powerful nose) tend toward the anti-Semetic stereotype. Hannah and her brother journey to a Jewish enclave in upstate New York in search of answers, where they find more flat characters who sound like the notes of a Hebrew school student. Hannah has dream/ memories from the Holocaust, family connections to the Golem of Prague, and literally no reason her mom couldn't have told her all of this from the beginning. Revelations come from letters and the aforementioned dreams. The most realistic segments of the book are when two different women try to justify serious boundary violations to their daughters by citing the fear of losing them.
The Ugly: Some unlucky soul will read this book instead of Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik and then gift it to her daughter because books about Jewish mythology are rare, and moms are like that.

More history of the Jewish mysticism please! I would like for it to have been fleshed out more, but overall? WOW. Excellent storytelling, world and character building! Just fantastic.

Hannah has spent her whole life moving from town to town with her mother and brother. But when Hannah wakes up on her seventeenth birthday with a pair of golden eyes with knife-slit pupils, the first of a series of mutations, everything is different. Hannah’s mom leaves, claiming that she knows someone who can fix it, and will be back soon. But days go by, then weeks go by and Gabe and Hannah are alone. They soon realize that they are going to need to figure this all out and find their mom. When a letter arrives that leads them to the family they never knew, a family history is discovered that is tragic and goes back to Poland during WWII, and is tied into Jewish mysticism. Can the family secrets be unraveled in time to save Hannah and her mom?
A mystical book that is deeply rooted in family, and the complications that come with them, this book takes you on a journey through modern days, the Nazi’s occupation of Poland, and mystical tales of Jewish culture. This book is a light fantasy, taking place in the real world with mystical aspects from Jewish folklore mingled in. This book examines what being part of a family means, and how complicated family can be. With themes of secrecy, family, identity, love, and heritage all woven together, this book will interest many readers. I did feel that the Jewish stories of folklore get lost in the beginning of the story, making them easy to toss aside and not understand the importance they play in the overall book. Somehow they missed the cues needed to point out that they were an important plot element when they are originally told. Otherwise, the story really ramps up in the last half and you really want to know how it all ends.

This was different than anything I have read lately & it was really good. This book immediately caught my eye because of the premise of Jewish fantasy!

I liked the look at the Jewish faith and the history of Hannah’s family. The relationships between Hannah, Gabe, and their Mom were so full of depth and emotion. We see a lot of pain in all the family dynamics. It was intense to see Hannah explore her family and what they mean to each other. We see a look at loss and grief in both the family's personal and historical context. I also really liked the sibling dynamic between Hannah and Gabe. They are both such great characters. We see them discover so much about themselves and their family as they go on this journey.

We see elements of queerness throughout the book but it doesn't take anything away from the characters.

I think Teens will like the fantasy but also contemporary elements in this book. They will relate to Hannah as she is trying to be a perfectionist in school but also everything else she is going through.

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC!

NetGalley ARC Educator 550974

This book draws you in right from the start. It is a tale of mysticism within the Jewish faith, family ties, curses and being one's true self. You will fall in love, experience the highs and lows of the book. OMG so amazingly perfect. Thank you Ms. Podos. I hope it becomes a movie.