With her new nov­el A Place For Peo­ple Like Us, Dani­la Botha demon­strates her mas­tery in cre­at­ing imper­fect pro­tag­o­nists. While Hannah’s quest for self-actu­al­iza­tion and mean­ing acts as the book’s nar­ra­tive anchor, each mem­ber of the sup­port­ing cast comes with a strong indi­vid­ual voice, sto­ry, and demand for attention. 

Hannah’s jour­ney from a couch-surf­ing art stu­dent to the emerg­ing matri­arch of a wealthy, lead­ing Ortho­dox fam­i­ly in Toron­to is under­stand­ably uneven. At times Han­nah jumps effort­less­ly over the obsta­cles cre­at­ed by oth­ers while strug­gling to move past the road­blocks she has made for her­self. Her dif­fi­cul­ties in accept­ing her capac­i­ty for agency and emo­tion­al matu­ri­ty are reflect­ed in the story’s irreg­u­lar time­line; Botha high­lights that the process of self-dis­cov­ery isn’t linear.

With this in mind, read­ers who are hop­ing for a clear redemp­tion arc are going to be dis­ap­point­ed. Engag­ing ful­ly with this book requires a cer­tain amount of com­fort with tox­ic rela­tion­ships and patience with peo­ple who make ques­tion­able per­son­al deci­sions. It is not nec­es­sary for read­ers to have any famil­iar­i­ty specif­i­cal­ly with Toron­to or its Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty to fol­low the sto­ry, but some knowl­edge of Ortho­dox social struc­tures, par­tic­u­lar­ly relat­ed to con­ver­sion and kiruv, will help read­ers to ful­ly appre­ci­ate the novel’s texture.

A Place For Peo­ple Like Us chal­lenges read­ers to con­sid­er what it is to con­struct and recon­struct the self in a web of intri­cate inter­per­son­al and soci­etal rela­tion­ships. Botha’s gift is in cre­at­ing char­ac­ters with whom read­ers empathize, and mak­ing them ques­tion which ver­sion of each char­ac­ter is the one who most deserves their sup­port. Ulti­mate­ly, A Place For Peo­ple Like Us will hold up a mir­ror to the ways in which read­ers find their own places in this world.