| Title: | Invisible City | |
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| Author: | Julia Dahl | |
| Publisher | Minotaur Books | |
| Publication Date: | May 6, 2014 | |
| Publisher's Description | Just months after Rebekah Roberts was born, her mother, an Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn, abandoned her Christian boyfriend and newborn baby to return to her religion. Neither Rebekah nor her father have heard from her since. Now a recent college graduate, Rebekah has moved to New York City to follow her dream of becoming a big-city reporter. But she’s also drawn to the idea of being closer to her mother, who might still be living in the Hasidic community in Brooklyn. Then Rebekah is called to cover the story of a murdered Hasidic woman. Rebekah’s shocked to learn that, because of the NYPD’s habit of kowtowing to the powerful ultra-Orthodox community, not only will the woman be buried without an autopsy, her killer may get away with murder. Rebekah can’t let the story end there. But getting to the truth won’t be easy—even as she immerses herself in the cloistered world where her mother grew up, it's clear that she's not welcome, and everyone she meets has a secret to keep from an outsider. In her riveting debut Invisible City, journalist Julia Dahl introduces a compelling new character in search of the truth about a murder and an understanding of her own heritage. |
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| My rating: | **** | |
What happens when the stranger in the strange land isn’t exactly a stranger? In Invisible City by Julia Dahl, Rebekah finds herself navigating a lot of new waters at one time: journalism, New York City, and the Hasidic population of Brooklyn. When Rebekah’s barely-understood Jewish heritage unexpectedly gives her an in, she fakes her way through knowing more than she really does to keep the information coming. Along the way she makes some mistakes, uncovers details about the crime that would have been impossible for any other reporter to get, and tumbles headlong into a world that barely makes any sense to her.
Rebekah is smart and determined, and the missteps that she makes could be the result either of her youth or of entering into an insular world that she wasn’t raised to understand. At times she reminded me of Tess Monaghan, both because of her dual Christian-Jewish heritage, and also because of her attempt to break into journalism at a time when the newspaper business is tougher than ever. I liked this book a lot, and would definitely read the next Rebekah Roberts outing; the revelation at the end of the book makes me want to know more about Rebekah’s family. I love it when an author can leave me wanting more, without using an abrupt cliffhanger to achieve this effect.
I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
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