Reviewed by Linda Dittmar
Review Source: Rethinking Schools
Book Author: Alice Rothchild
Especially now, when support for Palestinians is being cast as anti-Semitism, it takes courage to write a YA novel about a U.S. teenager’s journey into Israel’s Occupied Territories of Palestine, and yet this is what Alice Rothchild does in Finding Melody Sullivan. It also takes courage — different kinds of courage — for her young protagonist, Melody (16), and her friends Yasmina (Yaz, 17) and Aaron (16), to face the full import of Israel’s harsh presence in these territories, occupied since the 1967 war. At stake for both Rothchild and her protagonists is a reality that most media hide.
Melody, Yaz, and Aaron grow up in a Vermont college town — a bubble of sorts, as politically liberal, atheist Melody says and as Muslim Palestinian American Yaz confirms. For each of them this pleasant college town offers only a semblance of protective comfort. Jewish American Aaron, ardently hoping to become a rabbi, looks to Israel’s settler Zionism as the only bulwark against a perpetually threatening anti-Semitism, while Yaz lives in constant awareness of the devastating effects of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian lives. Even for Melody, steeped in her “American” world and initially untouched by these issues, home is not a safe haven. Angry, depressed, and feeling abandoned by her mother’s death and her father’s emotional distance, she keeps touching a scar on her wrist — a reminder of a suicide attempt. Continue reading on Rethinking Schools.
Finding Melody Sullivan by Alice Rothchild
on 2023
Genres: Palestine
Pages: 192
Reading Level: High School
ISBN: 9781951082376
Review Source: Rethinking Schools
Publisher's Synopsis: Sixteen-year-old Melody Sullivan is falling apart after the death of her mother. She pours her cynicism and grief into poetry and an intense relationship with her powerhouse best friend, Yasmina Khadour. When Melody's father drags her to an overseas archeology conference in Jerusalem, she is left to wander alone.
Hanging out on a Tel Aviv beach, smoking dope with her Israeli cousins and their army buddies, sounds like fun. While stoned, she is sexually assaulted by a friend of her cousin. She cannot share this devastating truth with her emotionally distant dad and impulsively flees to Hebron where Yasmina is visiting her family. As a Palestinian, Yasmina is unable to enter Jerusalem.
Melody's only other source of solace is Aaron Shapiro, a shy, religious boy back home with an awkward crush on her, but Aaron's anxious texts make it clear he believes she's wandering into enemy territory.
This is a story about trauma and taking emotional risks, about facing internal demons and the external realities of war and occupation, about finding oneself in the most unexpected places.
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