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    Safekeeping
    Unavailable
    Safekeeping
    Unavailable
    Safekeeping
    Audiobook13 hours

    Safekeeping

    Written by Jessamyn Hope

    Narrated by Kirsten Potter

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    It’s 1994 and Adam, a drug addict from New York City, arrives at a kibbutz in Israel with a medieval sapphire brooch. To make up for a past crime, he needs to get the priceless heirloom to a woman his grandfather loved when he was a Holocaust refugee on the kibbutz fifty years earlier. There Adam joins other troubled people trying to turn their lives around: Ulya, the ambitious and beautiful Soviet émigré; Farid, the lovelorn Palestinian farmhand; Claudette, the French Canadian Catholic with OCD; Ofir, the Israeli teenager wounded in a bus bombing; and Ziva, the old Zionist Socialist firebrand who founded the kibbutz. By the end of that summer, through their charged relationships with one another, they each get their last chance at redemption.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateJun 16, 2015
    ISBN9781681411835
    Unavailable
    Safekeeping
    Author

    Jessamyn Hope

    Jessamyn Hope grew up in Montreal and lived in Israel before moving to New York City. Her debut novel Safekeeping comes out June 2015. Her fiction and memoirs have appeared in Ploughshares, Five Points, Colorado Review, Descant, and PRISM international, among other literary magazines. She was the Susannah McCorkle Scholar in Fiction at the 2012 Sewanee Writers' Conference and has an M.F.A. in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

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    Reviews for Safekeeping

    3.5/5

    8 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Maybe 50-100 pages too long which feels harsh as there were definitely moments of grace and beauty. There is a genuine nobility in one of the character's resilience and insistence on staying true to her path. The strength of those that founded the kibbutzim in the 40s and dedicated their lives to selflessly building the nascent state and establishing an agricultural economy is often forgotten amid the wars and the politics. Readable and moving.
    • 2/5
      recovering addict moves to kibbutz in Israel to return a ring that his grandfather owned
    • 4/5
      The novel focuses on the lives of individuals on a kibbutz. With the exception of Ofir, a young man who aspires to be a famous musician, and Claudette, a young Canadian woman who was raised in an orphanage believing she was mentally ill, it was difficult to connect or feel much sympathy for the other main characters -- Adam, a young American who has come from NYC to Israel to find his late grandfather's long lost love and to escape a life of alcohol and drugs; Ziva, an avowed socialist and one of the original founders of the kibbutz; her son Eyal; Ulya, a young Russian woman whose only way to secure a visa to get out of Russia was to claim she was Jewish; and Farid, a young Palestinian who is a laborer on the kibbutz. It took me awhile to get into the book and I probably would not have read it if it were not a selection for one of my bookclubs. It will be interesting to read other reviews of this book.
    • 3/5
      I won my copy in a giveaway. There were a number of things I liked about this book, and others I didn't, which was the difference between my 3 rating and giving it a 4. I had the audio book, and I really enjoyed the narration. I'm no expert, but I thought she was very good with the different accents and portrayals of the characters to be consistent with the way they are presented by the author.

      I love reading WWII fiction, and am always thrilled to find some new twist, and this is definitely the first thing I have ever read about an Israeli kibbutz. The flashback to the start of the brooch's story seven hundred or so years ago was a nice surprise. I enjoyed the story lines with Zeva and Claudette and Ofir. Unfortunately, I don't do really well with people who are really flawed and substance abuse. So the story lines around Adam and Ulya were nowhere near as pleasant for me.

      The time shift to the present was a shock, and the beginning of a downhill slide into an ending where nothing has ended. It was very dissatisfying, and such a surprise that I went back on the cd convinced I had missed something. These are just my personal preferences though - the writing is well done, and I am sure many other readers will be attracted by the same things that I didn't care for.