A review by thestoryprofessor
My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

challenging dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I added this book to my favorites for its powerful storytelling, living and breathing characters, perfectly rendered themes, and the emotional weight of a dying star the ending provides. This is a perfect novel, and I can’t wait to read more by Potok. 

World building: the historical world set in Brooklyn is perfectly realized, and then there is the Hasidic community: so richly and intimately rendered for the reader share in the weight of betrayal that the community feels when Asher Lev paints his final painting in the book, +++++

Characterizations: the characters are incredibly realized and beautifully humanized by Potok; no characterization belongs to a puppet for every character is intentionally crafted with whole worlds/lives beyond the narrator’s perspective; the narrator so interestingly rendered because we get what he sees and does, but a lot of how he feels has to be inferred based on what he does or how others react to him, which makes for a mysterious and interesting narrator, +++++

Plot: completely character driven, simple and yet complex because of the inner lives of the characters, heartbreaking ending

Pacing: slow and thoughtful, doesn’t meander or drag its heels because every moment has careful nuance crafted within, +++++

Themes: A novel long conversation about if an individual owes their life to who they are meant or their beliefs, family, and community; themes of destructive artistry, the drive of artists, religious identity, religious parameters being forced to be flexible with “outside” influences; more smaller themes about art, religion, abuse, hatred and anger, family, and fate, +++++

Prose: simple, purely showing over telling, thoughtful, poetic, revelatory, +++++