An art teacher, a bodega clerk, and a giant monster made of clay walk into a white nationalist rally in Kentucky. Readers may think they've heard this one before--but they haven't. This is the plot of Adam Mansbach's often hilarious and sometimes tragic The Golem of Brooklyn in which Len, a very stoned art teacher, accidentally creates a golem, a devastating creature of Jewish folklore that protects the Jewish people. Len is unable to speak Yiddish and can't understand the creature, so he recruits Miri, a neighborhood bodega employee whom he's heard curse people out in Yiddish; he figures she's suited for the job. Once the golem is told about the current state of affairs for Jews in America, it knows what it has to do--and what it has to do is violent. So begins a cascading adventure as these two misfits figure out how to control and direct a walking weapon for the Jewish people and consider whether they should "repair the world" or help destroy it.
Mansbach (The Devil's Bag Man; The Dead Run; Rage Is Back) tells a story that is a ridiculous but compassionate ride from start to finish--and is the kind of funny that will make readers cackle. Len and Miri are infinitely lovable, anxious, and complicated characters who propel the story. Some portions of the novel that explain the history of the golem feel a little more forced, but they don't detract from this literary adventure of mythic and uproarious proportions. --Dominic Charles Howarth, book manager, Book + Bottle