I am now contently working on Sloane Crosley’s I Was Told There’d Be Cake. I haven’t gotten too far into the book yet, but I’m enjoying it so far. Her wit is quick and she has a terrific way of describing things and inserting mini-stories into the already short stories. For instance, in a longer story about sleep-away camp and the lice infestation that arose therein, she ticked off the items which she was forced to incinerate, which included, “an amiable stuffed rabbit named Bruce, whose hobbies included warding off ghosts and being thrown at snoring girls.”

In that one moment, though referring to instances otherwise unmentioned elsewhere in the story, the reader is brought into the life of a cabin-dwelling 10-year-old in the middle of the night, and all the maleficent forces that conspire to rob one of sleep. The sentence (or rather, part of a sentence…there is more than one such gem in that singular sentence, alone) also conveys a child’s love for and attachment to a stuffed animal which, for anyone who has ever had or been a child (which should be most of us) is simultaneously intrinsic and ethereal.

Another shining aspect of these stories, for me, personally, is that the writer is unabashedly Jewish and relates of her parents in an according manner. It may seem strange to use the word “unabashed” in describing someone’s discussion of their faith, but for all of you people out there who have never felt the isolation on December 25th and the rest of the year as countless characters in the movies, on TV and in books talk in a manner that embraces a faith that is not your own, I can tell you with a certain degree of delight that there is something indescribably comfortable about being able to relate to a character with whom you have such a defining quality in common – something for which, it seems from my potentially damned perspective, Christians too often take for granted (it being the norm for them, and all).

No, Crosley doesn’t just mention that she is Jewish in passing, but rather embraces it as a pivotal aspect of her character’s background and motivation, which I quite enjoy.