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I’ve been trying to embrace the concept of the short book review, one that I can fit within the confines of an Instagram caption. There’s a few reasons I’ll do this, some of which probably only make sense in my head.

At any given time, I’m reading somewhere between say, 2-5 books. One of these books is my “main book.” Another is my “upstairs book,” one that I only read at night before bed. Because I’m an overwhelmed mess, it’s these upstairs books that tend to just get shorter reviews from me. A lot of my upstairs books tend to be YA, just because I prefer to read books that are around 300 pages or less before bed (again, this all makes sense in my mind).

So THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF HOODIE ROSEN had all the makings of a short/IG caption review for me:

-I was reading it before bed

-it’s YA

-although it’s a novel, it comes in at a slim 224 pages

But here I am, making a go of it with a full blog review, because…wow. Isaac Blum’s debut novel is one of the easiest five stars I’ve ever given a book. THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF HOODIE ROSEN is an absolute gem of a book, and without a doubt a new favorite contemporary YA novel…I just could not have loved this book any more!

Every so often (ehhhh more than that), someone on either Bookstagram or BookTok or wherever posts a super garbage take about how they would have liked a particular book more (almost invariably it’s a book written by a BIPOC author), but they just couldn’t relate to the main character.

It’s…an awful take, for a lot of reasons I’m not going to unpack here. But I was thinking a lot about that as I read THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF HOODIE ROSEN, because I adored everything about this book, and about Hoodie Rosen as a character. And my experience as a teenager could not have been more different than Hoodie’s.

Like, at all.

Hoodie Rosen is a member of a somewhat-recently displaced Orthodox Jewish community. They’ve all relocated to a town called Tregaron, which is mostly non-Jewish. Hoodie has a big family, with like…an endless amount of sisters. Just so many sisters. I’ll mention some of them in a bit.

Hoodie goes to an Orthodox school, where things just work a bit different than at a typical American high school. One of those key differences is if you feel like you need to get up & go for a walk, you can just…go for a walk. It’s on one of these walks that Hoodie sees & is instantly smitten with a girl named Anna-Marie.

Through a calamitous chain of events, we learn that Anna-Marie’s mother is the town’s mayor. The same mayor that is blocking a building project that Hoodie’s father is involved with. A building project designed to bring more Orthodox families to the neighborhood. So…it gets awkward.

But Hoodie & Anna-Marie continue to see each other, and it isn’t exactly a romance (which would be Totally Not Good in Hoodie’s world), but it’s…complicated. Sort of.

Or maybe just Hoodie makes it complicated. Because he’s a chaotic mess of a teenager, and just. Yeah. Either way, Hoodie spending time with Anna-Marie lands him in some hot water with his family & friends & the rabbis at his school.

The first thing to know about this book is that it’s fucking hilarious. Legitimately one of the funnier books I’ve read, and Blum pulls off a rare feat here: he works a lot of sarcasm into this book without things ever feeling overly cynical. I loved that.

The second thing to know about this book is that it goes to some dark, violent, and frighteningly real places. I’m maybe a little embarrassed to say that I didn’t necessarily see that coming, but yeah. There’s antisemitism in the book, even from the outset. But it escalates & escalates and becomes more violent as the story progresses, and readers should be aware of that. This is a delicate thing that Isaac Blum manages rather deftly, I think. Because this book is just overall so quirky & completely charming.

The scenes at Hoodie’s house felt the most special to me. There’s so much personality within his family…his older sister Zippy is kind of like the family manager or something. Technology is limited in the Rosen family, but Zippy is the keeper of the laptop, and she’s stationed at the kitchen table almost without exception, even sleeping there!

One of Hoodie’s younger sisters, Chana, is just inexplicably chaotic. She’s recently taken to the roof, where she throws boxes (or other projectiles) at passersby. For some reason, this put me in the mindset of some of the zanier 80’s teen comedies, and I was just cackling every time Chana showed up.

THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF HOODIE ROSEN is an incredibly special book, and definitely an early 2023 favorite. I just found these characters to be wonderfully endearing & I couldn’t wait to get back to reading this book every night. This book will break your heart a lot, but it’s worth it. And you’ll be laughing most of the time anyhow. Oof…this one is a treasure.

Huge thanks to Penguin Teen for sending this one my way!!