Reach­ing the age of b’nai mitz­vah induces pride but also ten­sion for any Jew­ish young adult. Imag­ine the lev­el of stress mag­ni­fied many times if, upon reach­ing the age of twelve or thir­teen, one became respon­si­ble for sav­ing the world from a pow­er­ful evil force. Draw­ing on Jew­ish folk­lore, but embroi­der­ing her own nar­ra­tive, Mari Lowe rais­es issues of moral respon­si­bil­i­ty and dif­fi­cult per­son­al rela­tion­ships in her fan­ta­sy novel.

Ezra Safran is approach­ing his bar mitz­vah under tremen­dous pres­sure. He is a Nivchar, the child born each gen­er­a­tion who must ensure that sta­bil­i­ty of Beinoni time. Dur­ing this era, which has exist­ed from the return of the Jews from the Baby­lon­ian exile, there is a cru­cial bal­ance between good and evil. The world is not per­fect, but nor is it under immi­nent threat. As Ezra solemn­ly acknowl­edges, ​“the fate of the world depends on my not being aver­age.” Specif­i­cal­ly, he will be called upon to fight the gurya dinu­ra, a fiery lion who has the poten­tial to engulf the world in his pow­er­ful grip. Ezra trains for his role with Gadi, an expert in com­bat and resis­tance, dur­ing their ses­sions in the vil­lage of Chor­vos Hago­ral. Sim­i­lar to an arche­o­log­i­cal site, but tran­scend­ing time and space, the ancient set­ting is also the head­quar­ters of the San­hedrin. This gov­ern­ing legal body is not rel­e­gat­ed to the his­tor­i­cal past in Lowe’s imag­ined world, but is a con­tem­po­rary insti­tu­tion, and Ezra’s father is a member.

One of the most dis­tinc­tive fea­tures of Beinoni is Lowe’s con­vinc­ing char­ac­ter devel­op­ment with­in a fan­tas­ti­cal set­ting. As in her pre­vi­ous nov­els, fam­i­ly rela­tion­ships and friend­ships are sources of emo­tion­al sup­port, but also ambiva­lence and con­fu­sion. Ezra’s aca­d­e­m­ic per­for­mance and self-image as an achiev­er begin to decline. His alliance with Binyamin, a boy also respect­ed by adults and by his peers, sud­den­ly changes course. Ezra has always encoun­tered hos­til­i­ty from Aryeh, a stu­dent who has lost his par­ents and lives with a fos­ter fam­i­ly. Aryeh’s seething anger and anti­so­cial behav­ior are forces to avoid, but, in spite of his father’s dis­ap­point­ment, Ezra finds more nuance than he had pre­vi­ous­ly in Aryeh’s motives. Both in the famil­iar real world and in the loom­ing strug­gle of the fan­tas­tic one, peo­ple are not always who they seem to be. Lowe cred­i­bly nav­i­gates the tran­si­tions between these inter­sect­ing spheres; return­ing from an explo­ration of caves at Chor­vos Hago­ral, he throws some frozen piz­za bagels in the microwave for dinner.

Lowe con­scious­ly intro­duces char­ac­ters from a diverse range of Jew­ish cul­tures, and also some non-Jew­ish char­ac­ters. Dr. Chopra is the well-mean­ing psy­chi­a­trist who diag­noses ADHD, but his enthu­si­asm for the dra­mat­ic suc­cess of med­ica­tions to treat this prob­lem has an almost car­toon­ish aspect. Children’s behav­ioral changes some­times have mul­ti­ple caus­es; this plot devel­op­ment seems some­what sim­plis­tic com­pared to the over­all sub­tle­ty of the novel’s structure.

There are a num­ber of sur­pris­es as Beinoni reach­es its excit­ing con­clu­sion. Good and evil exist side by side, and more than skill­ful sword­play is required to deter­mine the out­come of Ezra’s seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble task.