Never Mind the Goldbergs by Matthue RothPUSH (Scholastic), 2005

Hava Aaronson is seventeen and feels like she’s never fit in: “I guess I was just born different,” she says on page 1, which sort of made me roll my eyes and wonder if I was really in the mood for a YA novel after all—and maybe I wasn’t—but I kept reading. Hava’s an Orthodox Jew; she listens to Sleater-Kinney and Hole and Ani Difranco and wears a Metallica t-shirt to school, with her ankle-length skirt, and she’s ready for a change of scenery. Luckily, it’s the end of the school year, and she’s somehow gotten the chance to go to LA to audition for a sitcom. She ends up on the show, which is about an Orthodox Jewish family, though she’s the only cast member who’s actually Orthodox, and spends the summer in Hollywood acting and figuring herself—and her religion—out, or trying to. The California setting and the tone of some of the descriptive passages about Hollywood are very Francesca Lia Block, not that that is necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes I didn’t quite buy Hava’s character/voice, though—would this girl who goes to hang out on Saint Mark’s Place really say that one of her teachers, who wears “modest crew-neck sweaters, flowy poetry skirts, smart-looking hats that no goyim would guess she wore to comply with the religious mandate of covering her hair,” “looked like a rock star” (p 6)? Even so, this book was often pleasing, in that breathless-YA way, and Hava’s a smart, introspective narrator who’s pretty appealing.