Beth Kander’s I Made It Out Of Clay has all the mak­ings of a clas­sic hol­i­day rom-com: a nuanced female pro­tag­o­nist, sev­er­al fun side char­ac­ters, and a mys­te­ri­ous love inter­est that just might be too good to be true. The main char­ac­ter, Eve, strug­gles to bal­ance her work and per­son­al life; she yearns to sim­ply turn her phone off and keep it off for­ev­er, some­thing that may res­onate with read­ers. Chap­ter one finds Eve stressed about her upcom­ing for­ti­eth birth­day, because of her lack of a love life, insta­bil­i­ty at work, and a cou­ple creepy inci­dents that are prob­a­bly noth­ing, right? Her lov­ing friends bring lev­i­ty and chuck­le-wor­thy quips to try to lift her spir­its, while encour­ag­ing her to find Mr. Right (maybe her hot neigh­bor?) and bring him as her date to her sister’s rapid­ly approach­ing wedding. 

Don’t be fooled by its seem­ing­ly light social dra­ma. I Made It Out of Clay pro­vides a deep explo­ration of grief, both inter­nal­ly for its char­ac­ters, as well as the larg­er, col­lec­tive grief felt by a peo­ple who suf­fer per­se­cu­tion in a myr­i­ad of forms in every gen­er­a­tion. At the same time, there are warm moments of joy and con­nec­tion between char­ac­ters. But for Eve, there lingers an under­ly­ing cur­rent of iso­la­tion beneath all of her inter­ac­tions, ever since the death of her father. All she wants is to process it with her fam­i­ly, yet she feels unable to do so. She can’t snap out of it with her friends for more than short peri­ods of time either. And so she embarks on a jour­ney to take some con­trol of her life after remem­ber­ing an old Yid­dish myth her beloved grand­moth­er shared with her long ago — the Golem. 

Kander’s writ­ing weaves togeth­er the emo­tion­al every­day stres­sors and obsta­cles of life, along with the deep­er, dark­er expe­ri­ences that all hap­pen simul­ta­ne­ous­ly to us. It’s tough wor­ry­ing that one might lose one’s job, but also what if one acci­den­tal­ly released a mag­i­cal mal­leable guardian into the world and is now respon­si­ble for his actions? If not real-world relat­able, Kan­der cer­tain­ly makes it feel relat­able. I Made It Out of Clay is a fun Hanukkah romp that reels one in with the promise of light camp but keeps one engaged with sur­pris­ing depth and heart. It is cer­tain­ly worth read­ing on a cold win­ter night, as the Hanukkah can­dles burn.