This lat­est sto­ry col­lec­tion by Cana­di­an writer Dani­la Botha cel­e­brates the joys of cre­ativ­i­ty and authen­tic­i­ty and the messi­ness of Jew­ish iden­ti­ty. Botha takes a trip into Israeli and Dias­po­ra com­mu­ni­ties over the course of one hun­dred years, bring­ing us on an odyssey full of sweep­ing ideas cap­tured in com­pact prose. 

Botha’s view of times and places can feel nos­tal­gic, espe­cial­ly when she is explor­ing inter­gen­er­a­tional rela­tion­ships, but it is rarely sepia-toned. As we meet each char­ac­ter, Botha makes it clear that we are see­ing only a part of them — but it may be one of the most essen­tial parts, and it may be that they are final­ly see­ing it them­selves. In this way, the author does not just give us a win­dow into her char­ac­ters’ lives, but she also holds up a mir­ror to our own.

Botha is admirably non­judg­men­tal about the choic­es her char­ac­ters make, regard­less of the con­se­quences. She show­cas­es their vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, their dis­cov­er­ies, and their rela­tion­ships to con­for­mi­ty and expec­ta­tions. While it’s pos­si­ble to extract sys­temic social com­men­tary from the col­lec­tion as a whole, each piece stands on its own, high­light­ing indi­vid­ual char­ac­ters tak­ing their own next steps — steps that do and don’t align with the hopes and plans of either them­selves or of those with whom they appear close.

Read­ers will become ful­ly immersed in the diverse range of Botha’s set­tings, and Jew­ish mil­len­ni­al read­ers — par­tic­u­lar­ly those from Toron­to — will rec­og­nize the char­ac­ters’ voic­es in the peo­ple they’ve known all their lives. Like the sto­ries shared at a fam­i­ly reunion, Things That Cause Inap­pro­pri­ate Hap­pi­ness is some­thing to be savored and revis­it­ed for years on end.