Tuna Fish is decid­ed­ly main­stream Jew­ish fic­tion offer­ing an unusu­al set­ting, a strong cen­tral char­ac­ter and a nar­rat­ing voice with atti­tude. Under­ly­ing the flip­pan­cy and humor is respect for fam­i­ly, neigh­bor­hood, mem­o­ry and ethics. Author Esmé Codell recalls a year from her child­hood, 1979, when she was in fifth grade and her Jew­ish fam­i­ly lived in a sag­ging apart­ment build­ing in a poor, seedy neigh­bor­hood in Chica­go. She orga­nizes her mem­oir by top­ic, thus Jew­ish con­tent is dom­i­nant in only one of the sev­en chap­ters. How­ev­er, the oth­ers are dot­ted with Yid­dish expres­sions, ref­er­ence to Yid­dish immi­grants and Jew­ish val­ues. Here is an hon­est pic­ture of life in an assim­i­lat­ed, non-obser­vant Jew­ish house­hold. Fur­ther­more, it por­trays a mod­ern, urban, poor fam­i­ly. Poor peo­ple are rare in Jew­ish children’s lit­er­a­ture where pover­ty mag­i­cal­ly dis­ap­pears with the Amer­i­can­iza­tion of our immi­grant gen­er­a­tions. Codell writes very well, main­tain­ing a fast pace with poet­ic style. She is obser­vant, per­cep­tive about what she sees, warm, fun­ny, car­ing, full of ener­gy and real. Read­ers who like the nar­ra­tors in Amy Koss’ fic­tion will bond with Codell imme­di­ate­ly. The vignettes offer strong ver­bal pic­tures of anoth­er time and old­er tech­nol­o­gy. Descrip­tions of rotary phones and record play­ers are straight­for­ward for young read­ers and a hoot for adults. The last chap­ter recalls what it was like to live a block from your grand­moth­er and to have dai­ly inti­ma­cy with cousins and extend­ed fam­i­ly. The chap­ter on reli­gion, ​“Steal­ing the Afikomen,” is strong­ly fem­i­nist; Codell con­fronts her local Con­ser­v­a­tive synagogue’s male focus. A prize of any­thing is promised to the boy who steals the matzah from under the rabbi’s chair; Codell decides she will do it and does. How­ev­er, she does not get the promised prize. Dis­il­lu­sioned, she drops out of Sun­day School. Her father sug­gests Bud­dhism as an alter­na­tive, a shock to upper ele­men­tary read­ers now, but a bur­geon­ing trend among eth­nic Jews then. This sto­ry and oth­er mem­o­ries reflect dif­fer­ences between obser­vant and assim­i­lat­ed Jews; these issues come across as strug­gles of reli­gious con­nec­tion. At no time, despite argu­ments and ques­tion­ing, do the par­ents repu­di­ate their Jew­ish iden­ti­ty. Many Reform adults read nov­els about Ortho­dox com­mu­ni­ties as exot­ic. Ortho­dox young­sters could feel the same here; what is life like for a dif­fer­ent kind of Jew? This is a deli­cious sto­ry about a young girl try­ing to under­stand her world, push­ing the bonds of author­i­ty with­in the bounds of her Jew­ish moral­i­ty. The book and its mov­ing intro­duc­tion impress on young read­ers the impor­tance of cher­ish­ing fam­i­ly mem­o­ries. Rarely are emo­tion­al riffs so much fun. This book will have great appeal for read­ers ages 8 to 12.