Our lives are built on sto­ries. They start from a young age, our par­ents read­ing to us from our favorite books and our friends whis­per­ing tales in the dark. These sto­ries serve as a foun­da­tion for our knowl­edge of the world, as well as a shield or an escape. 

The Maid­en and Her Mon­ster by Mad­die Mar­tinez explores the sig­nif­i­cance of sto­ries in rela­tion to faith, pol­i­tics, love, and sense of self. Mal­ka, the pro­tag­o­nist, is pro­pelled by the sto­ries of her youth when the read­er meets her as she sets out to find a mon­ster. For five years, any girl who ven­tured into the for­est known as Mavetéh was tak­en by a mon­ster, what her town calls the Ray­ga — includ­ing Malka’s best friend, Cha­ia. But after Malka’s moth­er is accused of killing a mem­ber of the church with Kefesh, a kind of Yaha­di mag­ic, Mal­ka promis­es to find the mon­ster in exchange for her mother’s life. She does not expect to sur­vive the for­est, nor does she expect to learn the secrets of Kefesh from the infa­mous golem, a char­ac­ter in the sto­ries she grew up hear­ing. But her need to pro­tect her moth­er and sis­ters over­pow­ers any fear that may arise. Side by side with her stead­fast friend, Amnon, Mal­ka must tra­verse the woods’ dan­gers to dis­cov­er the cul­prit of her town’s mis­for­tunes, attempt­ing to save those she holds most dear in the process. 

An excit­ing and heart­warm­ing debut, The Maid­en and Her Mon­ster draws inspi­ra­tion from Jew­ish his­to­ry and mys­ti­cism to cre­ate a world that feels famil­iar and char­ac­ters that cap­ti­vate. The book, though set in a world akin to the seventeenth-century’s Pale of Set­tle­ment, touch­es upon themes that are just as rel­e­vant to our world today — cor­rup­tion in gov­ern­ment, the use of faith to jus­ti­fy vio­lence, fear­ing oth­ers sim­ply because they are dif­fer­ent. It feels par­tic­u­lar­ly potent that the book dis­cuss­es how sto­ries can be manip­u­lat­ed as means to an end. Towards the end of the nov­el, Mal­ka comes to the real­iza­tion that sto­ries hold this immense pow­er: “…sto­ries are not mere­ly sto­ries at all. They are jus­ti­fi­ca­tions. Ones we tell over and over to under­stand the deci­sions we make and those we will make.” 

But sto­ries can also be mag­ic. In the myth of the golem, words and prayer are what brings the crea­ture to life: the inscrip­tion of the word, emet, on its fore­head marks the unre­lent­ing belief that went into its cre­ation. Mal­ka learns the pow­er of words — and the reimag­in­ing of those words — to cre­ate Kefesh, bend­ing the world to her will in mirac­u­lous ways. By wield­ing Kefesh, Mal­ka feels what it is like to be pow­er­ful; as the eldest daugh­ter, she has always been vic­tim to her father’s anger, to the pres­sure of pro­tect­ing her loved ones, and to the accep­tance that her life would be ordi­nary and planned. But this new­found pow­er alerts Mal­ka to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a new future, one where she can cre­ate some­thing out of noth­ing, where she can heal impos­si­ble wounds. A future where she is allowed to want more. Infu­ri­at­ing­ly, that want comes in the form of the mon­ster she has been taught to hate. 

This book speaks to the pow­er of sto­ries to cre­ate, to destroy, and to change. It explores the idea that sto­ries are how we exist in the world; for the Jew­ish peo­ple, tales of exile and faith remind us that we remain, and that we car­ry on mem­o­ries and tra­di­tions for gen­er­a­tions to come.