This novel was exquisitely, heartfully written. It felt so authentic and what was really unusual about it was that you got such a powerful evocation of the smells, sights, land and people. It was vividly evoked in every way. I don't like novels which are afraid to show the darker sides to mother and daughters and this was subtle, not a melodrama, but it beautifully and sensitively showed the struggle a young 14 year old girl has with her overwhelming mother. The mother is both wonderful, charismatic, loving but also suffocating and without boundaries to her love. Very nuanced.

Since this novel is poetically written and about place and character, it's for those who prefer literary fiction to plot-driven commercial fiction. You have to patient with it and pay attention to each sentence but our club loved reading it aloud for its gorgeous sentences and analyzing the characters presented in such depth. We also loved the picture it painted of Israel and Palestine in the 1960's.

A wonderful, thought-provoking read.

My book club devoured this book. We didn't stop to sample the food at the meeting because we were all talking about the novel so much. Not only is it exquisitely written, but the story is haunting. The relationship between the young girl and her mother paralells is one, like the relationship between Israel and Palenstine, that shifts borders and has dangerous consequences. Skolkin-Smith tunnels deep into the psyche of both her characters and a battle-torn country. Literary and page-turning, and unlike anything I've ever read before. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

With EDGES, Leora Skolkin-Smith earns her place among the most gifted of contemporary American authors. The novel is a reminder that works of fiction can offer the depth, color, texture, passion of a fine painting and a great symphony. This is more than a coming-of-age story; it is a powerful and beautifully wrought account of passion and hope...for a girl and for a country.

I was enjoying it so much that I didn't want it to end. It is beautiful - so honed, and beautifully composed. It's the book that anyone would want to be able to write. Because I can see the work in it - the toil - and of course it comes out as an easy read for me the reader - it just glides in there -

It took me only a few days to read Edges,this book blew me away. It is hypnotic, frightening--the feeling of danger never let up, not for a second. It is beautiful, visceral--I think of it and smell oranges and desert (I grew up in a desert), and oh--the author so nailed that terrible longing that I remember feeling at 14 or so. The scene in Palestine with the mother, all those shops, colors, smells--I was in heaven reading that, and scared to death at the same time.

To be able to write somebody like this mother, horrible and beautiful all at once, takes great talent. I also loved that it was smooth-- one second, or more than a second, then raw as hell the next. I think this is why the unexpected moments worked so well, why a Jewish mother, worried about safety, would suddenly drag her youngest daughter into a place that turns out to be not safe at all (those boys, after night fell, in Palestine), and why I bought, completely, Liana's taking off to find William, to find Paris, to find that something she longed for.

It's absolutely not perfect, but that's a good thing

I'd like to tout Leora Skolkin-Smith's new novel, Edges: O Israel O Palestine It's about the adventures of an adolescent girl in Israel in the early '60s. Her character's mother had grown up in British Mandate Palestine, one of several factors making the memory bank of this book so rich -- appropriate for a place with almost too much history to bear and retain one's sanity at the same time.
What is most memorable to me is the sense of place that Ms. Skolkin-Smith has achieved -- the sunny and scary Jerusalem and countryside -- and the hope, love, hate and fatalism of the groups, Palestinian and Israeli, living amongst and apart from each other in a thin, rocky, brilliantly bright corridor too rarely shaded by old gray-green olive trees.
Perhaps above all, the novel, told with restraint and poetic precision, is about how we shoulder on (and wing it) under the weight of history -- family and public. This tiny review also appeared in The Providence Journal under my name Robert Whitcomb

I really enjoyed the book. It's got a lot of tension and I felt I kept wanting to read, wanting to find out what was going to happen. The characters are totally alive and your descriptions of the land are so lyrical! It makes me want to ask--did this really happen to the author herself? So real! And at the same time surreal, suffused with the limited perceptions of a young girl. It made me think a bit of Ghost Dance, by Carole Maso. It is also about an odd relationship between a mother and daughter, told from a perspective skewed by the oddness.

“In Edges Leora Smith skillfully tells the story of a girl of fourteen in the wake of her father's suicide, brought abruptly by her distraught mother from a comfortable suburban Westchester to the harsh terrain of a young State of Israel. The girl is caught in the maelstrom of political claims between Israel and a West Bank, still part of the Kingdom of Jordan. The turmoil both of the girl and her mother is graphically detailed as they struggle to define themselves in the light of a haunted past and present. The poetry of the girl's sexual awakening ripples through many pages, softening the fierce realities of the conflict between Arab and Jew. The pages evoke as well the memories of a shared land, and the mother's childhood growing up in an old Jerusalem before the city was separated by physical barriers, the religious, cultural, divide between Arab and Jew easier to bridge. The author's vivid sense of landscape, her gift for identifying with both mother and daughter, Arab and Jew, gives the novel a unique sense of balance and brings the reader, regardless of political conviction into sympathy with this portrait of a vanished Jerusalem.”
-Mark Mirsky, FICTION

The book has many things to discuss, however, it could have gone much deeper into WHY???

This is a very poetic and complex book, and not meant for a quick read, I think. And for me what was strong was the mother and daughter relationship and the relationship the geography had to do with the girl's budding sexuality, her identity, and inner landscape. But it not for everybody. Mainly because it doesn't strive to provide more of the standard political answers we are so used to when anyone writes about the Middle East. Instead it's about people, what they are as individuals and their desperate search for a personal identity against this backdrop which threatens to deprive them of their separate personhood. It is very, very sexual and not for tepid hearts and souls, you have to be sort of brave to face what Skolkin-Smith tells us about sexuality, mothers and daughters and the inner life of adolescents. But if you're willing to go into those depths it an immensely satisfying book which doesn't settle for simple questions or answers. And one of the best I've read in a long, long time.

I think this review from the English blog "DoveGreay Scribbles" which I found best describes my own feelings about the novel and says it better!
"FROM DOVEGREY SCRIBBLES



Edges, O Israel O Palestine by Leora Skolkin-Smith, published by Glad Day Books which would seem to be an enterprise backed by the late Grace Paley,

'our particular purpose is to bridge the gap between imaginative literature and political articles and criticism which have been fixed under the labels of "Fiction" and "Non-Fiction." But the split has diminished literature and its usefulness to society. With these constraints writers find themselves engaged in a form of self-censorship that has to do both with artistic and formal considerations and what can be said.'

Centre stage, fourteen year old Liana Bialik who along with her mother and sister Ivy and following the suicide of her father, is returning to Jerusalem in 1963, thus interrupting a life growing up in the US.
This is her mother's homeland and as Ivy descends the steps from the plane sporting her badge declaring loudly PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON IS A DRUG ADDICT it's clear a clash of cultures is inevitable.
Except it wasn't as I anticipated, because in fact it's the Israeli culture that proves the more extrovert as their mother Ada quickly discards all inhibitions and throws herself back into the life she once knew. This is her homeland, physical, mental and spiritual, this is where her first family are and where she ultimately belongs and it takes her but a nano-second to roll down her stockings and start dancing. Ada's exuberance of course a complete surprise and cringe-makingly embarrassing to her adolescent daughters.
Liana has to find her own place in this troubled and divided land both as a daughter and a woman but also as a stranger, and set against a backdrop of rising military tensions and increasing danger this is never going to be simple.
Identity was never so hard-won as Liana's, but distracted by reclaiming her own persona, Ada unwittingly allows her daughter some space to do it. Space Liana may never have found in the US.
Infused with Israel-ness seems a ridiculous thing to say because how can I know? But somehow I felt I did understand Israel and as a country as much as a homeland. I could smell the land and feel the heat and the dust as well as the perils. However there is no mistaking the taste of the Jewish festivals celebrated in the household at One Metadulah Street as the family gather to mark the timeless and constant year-round observance of their faith.
Leora Skolkin-Smith was born in the US but spent her childhood travelling between New York and Israel and she has certainly soaked up a growing girl's view on these two contrasting edge to edge cultures, as well as those that border each other in the Middle East, her observation and detail breath life into this amazing little book. The writing is spontaneous and fresh and the dialogue crafted with such a natural feel that you hear it as you read.A commentator here tells me it will be a film and it should be a great one if true to the spirit of the book.
A small enough book to pass by next to all those might tomes shouting read me, but one to seek out and savour for sure.
It's been a vibrant and welcoming introduction as I set foot in Israel from my armchair."

This book got mixed reviews from members of our book club, but I enjoyed reading it. The author's descriptions of the setting were outstanding, but the characters and plot were a bit weak. We found plenty to discuss nonetheless.

This novel is not an easy beach read. It's intense and complex but filled many good, important questions about identity, both personal and national. I really think if you let it enter you--and it's very evocative, filled with scents and sensations and feelings and impressions, it gets under the skin and can be uplifting, mesmerizing. I left it feeling transported into another land and place and time.

It can be a difficult read sometimes but only because it doesn't settle for standard stereotypes and it's very sexual, exploring often taboo areas between mother and daughter and a young woman's authentic yearning to come into her own being.

I loved it.

Confused thoughts of a 14 year old, told through the wiser (older) author. It falls short of the mark in many ways, from the shallowness of the characters (very one dimensional), to the cheap imagery which is meant to be sensual and comes out looking cheap. The worst shortcoming: It leaves you wondering what motivated any and all her characters to behave the way they did!

The previous review is very off the mark. This novel is anything BUT shallow and it is never cheap, but brave and uniquely told. Nor does it settle for the sentimentality that often passes for character motivation. For those who prefer literary and poetic novels with depth and precision this is a book to savor and cherish.

This novel gives one an intimate understanding of how land and heritage affects the identity of this narrator,in this case a young girl on the cusp of womanhood. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it seemed so natural and truthful to me as I read it, a rare experience in fiction. I was nodding in recognition even though I'm not female or Israeli. How our motivations, anxieties, and personal decisions and choices can be forced upon us simply by history and the fatal cards it deals us against our wills. I think this is what Skolkin-Smith meant to portray, the tensions of forming any identity against a backdrop of war and terror and chaos. This book is for intrepid explorers of the human psyches, who don't just want prescriptive characters, but want to understand what is the sexual and mysterious undertow. As Liana goes into the forbidden territory, so, too, is the reader taken into the taboo lands of sexuality and internal, private chaos. Not for people who want a quick, familar read, one needs to pay attention here, closely, and follow the realistic turns of scene.

Both my book clubs read this book, which was interesting for me to see the way both group devoured it. We all loved the exquisite writing and the astonishing story of the young girl and her mother. What a writer! We were talking about the book way past our usual time, and we all cannot wait to read whatever the author writes next! Given what is going on in the Gaza Strip this is required reading for every thinking and feeling person.

This is an incredible, literary work of art. Our club could not stop talking about it. The author crafts brilliant characters--and given the situation in Israel/Palestine, you could not hope for a more important book to read.

Though this might not be everyone's cup, this is a very beautifully descriptive novel with characters drawn from inside out. It's impressionistic, like a painting, and is not a quick read. Many probing questions abound from it, about identity, both national and personal. Highly recommended for those who prefer a poetic novel, not a plot-driven or standard tale.

A very interesting read, poetic

The ladies of my book group unanimously disliked this book. The plot had many holes and inconsistencies. A simple edit for story continuity would have helped tremendously. Too many times we asked ourselves "Well how did we end up in this situation?", or "Where is this development taking us?" without any satisfying answers. After tripping over enough of these plot holes I could not suspend my disblief and immerse myself in the narrative. Also, the author's heavy reliance on the sense of smell to evoke emotion and establish a sense of place was over done and created a nauseating effect instead of an alluring one. In the end I found myself incredulous at the very high Amazon rating and the glowing online recommendations.

Do NOT believe the reviews on Amazon that raved about this book because those reviewers obviously did not read the same book our club did. The book was poorly written and edited (obvious continuity errors), had no plot and was sophomoric. It reminded us of a high school term paper that had been packed with meaningless details in order to bump up the word count. We would have given it zero stars if that had been possible.