First of all: genius title, absolutely genius. It suggests a sightseeing guide, doesn't it? Which is entirely appropriate for an episodically structured bildungsroman.

Daniel Meltz's protagonist, Andy Baer, does indeed have a rabbi-heavy time of it growing up. There's Rabbi Landy, aka Rabbi Rick, or just Rick, with whom Andy's mother is involved -- I say "involved" for the avoidance of spoilers about the nature of that relationship. And there's Rabbi Aaron Loobling, the chief object of Andy's adolescent fantasy life at the yeshiva to which his mother has sent him. Yeshivas, of course, are thickly populated with rabbis, though no others are as important to Andy's psyche as these two.

Andy's a memorable character. He's eleven when we first meet him, flying high the flag of his F in "deportment," a mouthy little horndog sexually experimenting with his somewhat grimy next-door neighbor. (For the record, there's no explicit sex involving minors, and Andy's messing-around partner is only slightly older than he is.) Mr. Baer is in absentia, having ditched the family altogether; Mrs. Baer's parenting is erratic at best and entails a fair bit of slapping. Their smart back-talking kid isn't necessarily the most likeable character you've ever met, but I dare you not to feel for him in his ongoing quest for connection, sexual and emotional. He has a lot of success with the former, not so much with the latter -- until college, by which time he and his older sister, Naomi, have established a combatively affectionate intimacy, and they both attempt to care, if not always adequately, for their younger brother, Toby. At the book's end, a certain self-admitted asshole turns up, to make an offer that I hope Andy will accept.

During the opening chapters of "Rabbis of the Garden State" I wasn't always sure what was going on. This was, I believe, not the result of narrative problems but rather of the fact that the ARC was a PDF and consequently the formatting on Kindle was a mess. So, for instance, sometimes there were paragraph breaks in dialogue, sometimes not; and Meltz isn't the world's biggest fan of dialogue tags. Later in the book, when I knew the characters' voices well, it wasn't difficult to figure out who was speaking. But early on, especially given that events are filtered through an eleven-year-old's POV, disorientation sometimes ensued.

About Andy and his pursuit of sex: he's never outright abused, as often happens to children and adolescents when they flirt and express sexual desire around adults who prove untrustworthy, but a couple of episodes edge close. Andy has one opinion of those episodes; many readers will have another, and they're queasy reading. In spite of that, I found the depiction of Andy's sexuality admirably realistic. Often I think we're afraid to acknowledge that children experience sexual desire, as if that would make it okay for adults to have sex with them. But the whole point is that children's sexuality is childlike (and that's why I stressed, earlier, that Andy's first experiments take place with another child).

I tagged "Rabbis of the Garden State" as having characterization problems, and these are the reason I'm giving four stars rather than five. The difficulties are built into the book's structure and narrative POV: for most of the book Andy's unable to see his mother, for example, as a fully realized person, so neither do we. As for Andy himself, he matures by saltation -- Meltz's narrative skips over the process, and I found myself wanting to know more about how he got from A, to B, to C ...

In short, the moving parts of "Rabbis" don't always mesh as well as they might -- nevertheless, a complicated story about complicated people, and satisfying for all its flaws. I very much want to read whatever Daniel Meltz writes next.

Note, I haven't tagged this YA or NA. Though the POV is tight first-person, and though we leave Andy at the end of his last year in college, "Rabbis of the Garden State" is an adult novel about a young person, not a novel intended specifically for young/new adults.

Many thanks to Mindbuck Media/Rattling Good Yarns and NetGalley for the ARC.

Andy is the middle child of a working-class Jewish family in New Jersey. The book opens in 1966 with Andy 11 years old. We get a detailed portrait of him and especially his mother, a divorced, self-involved woman who develops an obsession with their synagogue's new rabbi. The book moves through Andy's life, up through his last year of college and focuses on his own coming out as gay, and his own obsessions with another rabbi and a number of boys.

Andy's voice as the first person POV narrator is very strong and well developed. His details of the 1960s in the first third of the novel are incredibly well drawn. As someone who grew up in those same years in a lower middle class Jewish family, there was a lot I could identify with.

The novel felt looser in the second half, especially during Andy's high school and college years. I felt that there could have been more information about the outcome of his obsession with a high school classmate and with his explorations of the 1970s NYC gay scene.

I was provided an ARC by the publisher via NetGalley.

I'm not sure I was the target audience for this book, unfortunately. Based on the book's description, I was looking forward to a dry and humorous story set in a Jewish community in 1960s New Jersey, but what I read was a profoundly sad and, at times, quite upsetting, story about a young gay boy with an absent and abusive mother, who herself is victim of abuse. I did enjoy some of the writing, which, at times, felt reminiscent of Chaim Potok. At other points, the writing felt more like a play with stage directions, which wasn't entirely to my taste. I think there are readers out there who would enjoy this one—it just wasn't what I was looking to read.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.