When Claire and Abram divorce and Megan moves out, Jacob conveys his angst through a series of letters addressed to Megan. Jacob would love to rebel (he's got "a father so far up my ass you can see him performing in my pupils"), but mostly he mentally rewrites his bar mitzvah thank-yous as rants and fantasizes about his live-in babysitter, Megan. At 13, Jacob lives in a state of anxiety-his learning disability and his father's resulting disappointment erode his confidence Asher withdraws into adolescence his mother flees the house to pursue a Ph.D. At 10, Jacob's unthinkable sin of forgetting to wear his tzitzit to yeshiva sets off an amusing chain of events-Asher's scheming to trick the rabbi, the destruction of the rabbi's tzitzit and Jacob's suspension-that quickly turns sober when Jacob faces his father's rage. Jacob Green idolizes his older brother, Asher, and misses his withdrawn mother, Claire, but his father, the charismatic, tyrannical Abram, dominates the family. A witty, sensitive boy observes the darkly humorous goings-on in his Orthodox Jewish family in 1970s New Jersey.
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