The Only Daughter

As she travels in northern Italy during the Christmas holidays to go skiing, visit grandparents, and stay with a former teacher, 12-year-old Rachele Luzzatto is learning the importance of religious differences and the complexity of maintaining relationships. Her mother converted to Judaism in order to marry her father, and even as Rachele prepares for her Bat Mitzvah, she wants the role of Mother of God in the school Christmas pageant, something her father absolutely forbids. To add to her confusion and stress, she learns that her father is critically ill with a brain tumor. Beautiful, curly-haired, and intelligent, Rachele comes across as precocious and wise; unlike her father and grandfather, both practicing lawyers, she wants to become a judge immediately. The book takes place in the early 2000s but frequently evokes the Holocaust and Jewish history—unusually for celebrated Israeli author Yehoshua (The Tunnel), who tended to focuses on Israeli’s recent tumultuous decades.