Aline Nogueira Nogueira itibaren 5460 Cerdedo, Portugal itibaren 5460 Cerdedo, Portugal

Avery's best friend is his brother, that is until his brother is accidentily shot and killed. The life that Avery knew is over. His brother is dead, his parents are distraught, and he is sent to a new school. Avery's grades start to slide as he obssesses over his brother's murder and what to do with the fact that he knows the name of the shooter. Will Avery be able to pull his life together or will the need for revenge consume him?

Sepharad doesn’t really have a plot. It’s more like a series of essays on a theme. The theme, as I can best sum it up, is Diaspora. Molina focuses on the displacement of Spanish people during World War II and the Cold War. He weaves together stories of unknown citizens with those of famous authors who were affected by some of the traumatic events that occurred in 20th century Europe. He is constantly coming back to his theme and asking the reader, “How would you feel if you had to leave your home forever, if you had to live in fear of the police, if you felt different and cut off from everyone around you?” Molina makes a valiant attempt to put the reader in the shoes of his subjects and capture the emotion of unimaginable tragedies. The issue that I had with the book was its lack of structure. It is presented somewhat as a of stream-of-consciousness. Molina’s skill as a storyteller kept me mostly engaged, but at times I found my attention wandering. Sometimes I would get 10 or 20 pages into a chapter and realize I had no idea what the point of the story was, who the characters were or what was happening. The chapters aren’t very long so usually I could just muddle through until the next one. All of his stories relate to a central theme so even when they didn’t make sense I could still get a feeling for their relation to the novel. The book is a journey into the author’s head. The way he keeps returning to certain thoughts, characters and sentences mimics the way many people’s minds work. It keeps running through the same scenarios and problems over and over again. It’s always interesting to crawl inside someone’s psyche and see the world from a new perspective. I’m grateful to Molina for making the effort to bring readers into his mind.