Sacha Lamb’s The For­bid­den Book is a hyp­no­tiz­ing adven­ture teem­ing with Jew­ish mythol­o­gy and cul­ture. Full of mag­ic, mys­tery, pas­sion, and friend­ship, it’s a sto­ry that read­ers of all ages will appreciate.

Set in medieval times, the book fol­lows sev­en­teen-year-old Sorel Kalmans. Just before her wed­ding, she escapes out her win­dow and cuts her hair to dis­guise her­self as a young boy. On her jour­ney of self-dis­cov­ery, she quick­ly becomes entan­gled in a quest to solve the mur­der of the boy whose name she adopt­ed on a whim. Sorel is helped along the way by the boy’s dyb­buk, who begs her to find the killer. The fur­ther she gets from her wed­ding and her fam­i­ly, the clos­er the mys­tery brings her to home.

A sig­nif­i­cant theme in The For­bid­den Book is iden­ti­ty. Lamb offers young read­ers the chance to expe­ri­ence one such iden­ti­ty voy­age through the eyes of Sorel Kalmans. And Sorel is writ­ten so beau­ti­ful­ly that she is lov­able even in her most stub­born and infu­ri­at­ing moments. It is unmis­tak­able that Lamb under­stands the ques­tions that so many peo­ple must ask them­selves about them­selves: Who am I? Where do I go from here? What do I real­ly want? How do I want my rela­tion­ship to reli­gion to look?

The novel’s haunt­ing imagery calls up ethe­re­al dream­scapes while still remain­ing firm­ly plant­ed in the earthy muck and emo­tion­al tur­moil of the human con­di­tion. Sorel’s flight from inno­cence is abrupt, and her com­pan­ions are diverse. There is noth­ing miss­ing from this mas­ter stroke of literature.