BOOK REVIEW: Tarantula by Eduardo Halfon

First sentence: “We woke up to screaming.”

Wow. I went into this completely blind — and think you should too. All you need to know about the premise is that a pivotal event occurs at a Jewish children’s camp in a remote forest in Guatemala.

An unsettling, thought-provoking book about how the legacy of victimhood can become a kind of ideological weapon — and how trauma is passed down through generations. So many big questions emerge — about identity and rootlessness, confronting the past and the ethics of memory — despite (or perhaps because of) its taut prose, small cast, and fragmentary structure.

The ending may feel unresolved to some, but I found it satisfying. Morally uneasy and extremely relevant, this is a book I suspect I’ll be thinking about for a while.

Out May 19th from Bellevue Literary Press by Eduardo Halfon