Fans of Dou­ble Cross­ing (Cin­cos Pun­tos, 2005) will be glad to have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to read more about Raizel Balaban/​Rose Alt­man in this sequel. A pre­lim­i­nary chap­ter pro­vides enough infor­ma­tion for read­ers who haven’t yet met Rose and her fam­i­ly. The nov­el opens with Rose and her father excit­ed­ly meet­ing the rest of the fam­i­ly, final­ly arrived from Rus­sia. Mama doesn’t know that Papa is no longer an obser­vant Jew and she doesn’t under­stand why Rose wants to stay in school, rather than help­ing out at home and then get­ting mar­ried. Rose’s broth­er Lem­mel has a very dif­fi­cult time adjust­ing to life on the Low­er East Side, not least because some sort of learn­ing dif­fer­ence pre­vents him from learn­ing to read. He joins a gang of pick­pock­ets, runs away from home to avoid the shame of not being able to read Hebrew at his bar mitz­vah, and even­tu­al­ly gets arrest­ed. Eve Tal squeezes many of the stress­es com­mon to ear­ly 20th-Cen­tu­ry ten­e­ment liv­ing into this nov­el, such as seri­ous ill­ness, con­flict between ideals of the Old and New Worlds, job loss, and strug­gles to fit in with Amer­i­can life. Try­ing to fit all this in one nov­el, along with par­ent-child strug­gles, a friend get­ting drugged and near­ly raped, the fam­i­ly tak­ing in a board­er, and a school essay con­test about Christo­pher Colum­bus, means that sup­port­ing char­ac­ters get almost no devel­op­ment. Coin­ci­dences play a sig­nif­i­cant role in fur­ther­ing the plot, and sev­er­al dif­fi­cul­ties are resolved with last minute reprieves. Despite that, read­ers will like­ly be eager for the next install­ment in Rose’s life. A glos­sary of Hebrew and Yid­dish terms will help read­ers unfa­mil­iar with those words. Rec­om­mend­ed for ages 12 – 15.