Fans pick 100 books like Detour Ahead

When her parents decide to renovate a run-down motel in upstate New York, eleven-year-old Miriam must begin her life anew in a community unfamiliar with Jewish people.

She is befriended by her Catholic neighbor, Kate, and together they scheme to save two businesses in financial trouble. I loved the way this book built interfaith bonds between people, respecting everyone’s traditions. Readers will enjoy watching Miriam as she learns new strengths and interacts with family. 

I loved this book for its blend of suspense, family dynamics, and coming-of-age. Set in 1970s Atlantic City, we meet 13-year-old Joey Goodman, who spends the summer at his family’s hotel on the boardwalk. When he gets caught up with a group of mobsters, Joey faces new challenges and temptations that test his morals and courage.

Nockowitz beautifully captures Joey’s struggle between loyalty to his family and the allure of adventure and independence. He portrays the competing values of family and self-determination, all focused around Ski-Ball as a central metaphor. The novel’s historical setting is vividly brought to life, making Joey’s journey feel like a trip in time—to a nostalgic yesteryear many young readers won’t know but soon will fall in love with.

Half Jewish and half Chinese, Lauren doubts herself after an insensitive music teacher says she belongs in the chorus of the school musical because she doesn’t look American enough for the leading role.

Tara, Lauren’s best friend, is cast as the lead instead. Lauren isn’t sure she can hide her own disappointment to support her friend. With the help of her two grandmothers who share wisdom from both of their traditions, Lauren learns to claim her identity and believe in her own considerable talents.

As a reader, I personally identified with Lauren’s love of singing and was rooting for her every step of the way. 

Imani is thirteen and approaching her Bat Mitzvah. She is also an African-American adopted by a white Jewish family.

She has many questions about her birthparents and her own place in the world. When she has the opportunity to read the diary of her adopted mother’s grandmother who fled Europe as a Jewish refugee during World War II, Imani learns why sometimes mothers make impossible choices to save their children’s lives.

This novel is a riveting mix of history and coming of age. 

Strangers in Budapest is exotic, gorgeous, and like a beautiful orchestra on paper. It also keeps you turning the pages.

A young American couple move here with their baby son after the fall of the Communists, but they bring their ghosts with them, and assimilating is difficult. especially when they encounter an elderly Jewish-American veteran, who has come to Hungary to exact revenge on someone he is convinced married and then murdered his daughter. Just dazzlingly original.

Levine’s important book – scholarly and yet accessible to general readers – looks very seriously at the efforts of Jews through sports to define their identities as Americans and as Jews.

I appreciated his keen eye for charming and insightful memoirs and anecdotes of the life experiences of both well-known Jewish athletes who made it to the professional ranks and also of the masses of Jews who embraced athleticism in urban playgrounds and who turned up at stadiums and arenas to cheer on their heroes.

Riess brought together nine of the most thoughtful historians and one outstanding non-fiction writer who understands the impact sports has made on American Jewish identity and culture.

I read these engrossing essays and can recommend them as a useful complement to Levine’s work and together they deepened my thinking on a subject that is more than just an academic exercise for me.

Now that I’ve raised the issue of whiteness – ways in which American structures and institutions reflect the agendas and interests of white people, and the role those structures play in shaping opportunity and life experiences -- here I want to bring it front and center. Many white people don’t recognize how they benefit from having white skin (called “white privilege”) and many white ethnic groups, including many white Jews in the U.S., deny their white privilege altogether, insisting that they too have been the victim of white discrimination, and that anti-Black racism is no different. Brodkin offers a powerful counter-narrative, pointing out the many important ways that American Jews of European descent did indeed benefit from their white skin even when they did not realize it. 

As a Catholic convert myself, I have long been interested in the spiritual journeys of these two, a middle-aged, conservative English professor and a young divorcee with two sons. Actually, two unlikely loves play out in this non-fiction biography: first young Lewis with Mrs. Moore, thirty years his senior (who may or may not have been his lover), and much later Joy, a Jewish convert to Christianity and former communist. Her death, just four years after their marriage, is mourned in Lewis’ own book, A Grief Observed, the only book I found comforting after my husband died. 

I found this book while I was researching for my own book and have been recommending it regularly to families ever since. It promotes a positive view of neurodiversity without being ‘PollyAnna-ish’–I would call it positive realism.

It was written over thirteen years ago now, so not all the language will be perfect for everybody by today’s standards. However, the concepts are still very current, and they are expressed sensitively. Clinical conditions such as autism, ADHD, and dyslexia are described in a very accessible way, demonstrating how symptoms are on a continuum, and many of us can relate to at least some features of most of the conditions.

Chapters on depression and anxiety are included, and while these arguably fall under mental health rather than neurodiversity, I was really glad of their inclusion in this book, as the overlaps between mental health conditions and neurodiversity are many, and clinical distinctions… show more.