... It's a murky, rambling, frustrating book. Though I suppose it might appeal to some people who can put up its dense style, keep in mind it's certainly not an easy read.

Besides the style, the content is also bizarre. As a religious Jew myself, I expected to identify with this book. Nothing could be further from the truth. The characters are obsessive-compulsive, unhappy and fanatical, and Judaism's appeal to the main character seems to be in providing a set of rules and prayers with which she can torture herself. The book's religious references seemed arbitrary to me - Govrin quotes a mish-mash of Jewish prayers at random - and her description of one of the rabbis goes totally against traditional Judaism. (Govrin doesn't seem to have a problem only with Orthodox Jews: her secular characters are equally odd and unbelievable.)

I can't believe this book won the Israel Prize - ... I also wonder if this translation is off.

How on earth did this book ever get published. I don't know whether it's the translation that's the problem or whether it just needed a much better translator and editor. It's all over the place and while I enjoy a surrealistic or experimental approach I think this needed a good edit or rewrite or a better translator. I found much of the imagery etc in it jarring and it just didn't work, in English anyway. It seemed like a work in progress by a student of creative writing.

I think it had a lot of potential - the author has done a lot of research and put an enormous amount of work into it, but quite frankly I got about 1/3 of the way thru it and gave up. I'm glad I didn't buy it but borrowed it from my local library.

I recently saw the author on a panel discussion at a Writer's Festival and did expect something better from her writing.

Naomi Lyons

I think this book is more slow than a turtle. When I read the book description I was very interested and I bouth it, but it turn out that this hole book could have been said in just one chapter. I had the impresion that I was not moving on with the story as I kept reading. There was way to much description and no dialogs at all. To coplicatly written and if the author tried to say something here I did not andurstand what it was.

This is about a girl whos family dos'nt have alot of money but she struggles to dance. She dances barefoot, because she dos'nt have the money to buy shoes. Her life does finnally change a little bit and you should read this book to find out HOW. I would reccomend this for a 14 and up age group because I read it when I was a little to young and it was boering for me. Read it to find out how her life changes!

Bewildered in Berlin is one of her newer (a relative term as she has been writing since the 20's) titles and has bypassed her mid century funk that effected the dialogue in some of her other books. It is the story of a girl who is desperate to save her father from the Kaiser. She meets a British foreign agent and they work together to get the three of them out of hostile Germany intact.

Good for school instruction about diversity inUSA

The story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton is an important part of the education of young children. This book is useful in that it relates the story of her childhood, but, the conclusion was weak and the reader is left feeling discouraged-this little girl excels in everything she tries, unfortunately, because of the time period is excluded from higher education. We find out that she married and had a lot of children and was still able to find time to help other women and she worked hard to change the way women and children were treated by society. We are given no insight into what changes she was an important part of-I came away from the book understanding very little of what she actually did. Just a few sentences discussing the legislation and laws she was intimately involved in changing, just saying she was an important figure in the women's movement and actively worked for the right of women to vote and to be treated equally, would go a long way towards making this a truly illuminating book.

Fool's hill is an okay book.I didn't like the story because it had to do with cigarettes.14 year old Libby Burke is considered a faller. She thinks that there are two categoies in the world the laughers and the fallers.She decides to change her life when her sister goes to Chicago.One day she is sitting on the lawn and two girls drive by and they stop and talk to her.They introduced each other.Thier names were Rosalyn and Linda.Rosalyn and Libby become best friends.And her other best friend Alice witch is a faller gets pushed out of the way.Rosalyn and Linda smoke so LIbby tries it.She gets hooked on it.Her dad has a very good reputaion in this town,and he told her not to ruin it with her new friends.Well she does. Her friends ask her to go to Fool's hill.So she does.And when she gets caught her dad is very angry.Her dad said that she was never to see them agian.

I thought it was a very good book. Some parts of the book actually gave me the chills. I thought it was a little ... how Lana was in high school, and was volunteering all her spare time to work at the museum. I don't think anybody of that age would actually get their hair cut to look like an Egyptian princess, but it was very descriptive. I liked how Barbara used her imagination to make Lana's role model,... It was a big surprise to me. I liked how she kept describing Nefra and Lana's feelings when she was by his coffin-type thing.
Overall, I think that Barbara did a great job, but she needed to make Lana not be so involved in everything about Egypt, that she would rather volunteer at the museum than be with her cheerleading boyfriend, Josh.

I think Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine is one of the greatest authors of our times, but I found this book boring,long,and meandering, much as I felt about The Chimney Sweepers Boy. These are the only two in a long, long line of great stories, that I did not care for. Please look for earlier Rendell/Vine books, The Bridesmaid, Going Wrong, The Face Of Trespass, Make Death Love Me, King Solomons Carpet (fabulous), The Killing Doll, A Fatal Inversion, The House of Stairs, the list is endless. One bad apple does not an orchard make, and her orchard is superb.

Though Grasshopper was worth the reading, I think that fans of Vine/Rendell know there are better novels by her out there. If you're not familiar with this author and haven't read King Solomon's Carpet, if you enjoyed this book, I'd highly recommend that one. It seems to succeed where this one falls a little flat. Grasshopper didn't make my favorite Barbara Vine book list...but it came close. Still, the characters in Grasshopper were thought-provoking and this alone made it all worthwhile. Nobody can create characters and set a mood like Barbara Vine.

After having read Barbara Vine's latest novel, "Grasshopper," I thought I'd peruse the reviews. The pros are full of praise (if not outright ecstatic words) about this book; it disappointed just about all of the civilians (readers). Why, I asked myself. A few thoughts thereon: this book has some things in common with the previous ones by Barbara Vine, to be sure, but it has no Great Revelation in the last pages (in fact, the author herself says that who "my husband" is will not surprise the reader), and there are some unanswered situations as well. Not typical. Not totally tidy. But not bothersome, either, at least, to this reader. The book is full of the usual Vine touches: lots of details about places, lots of little lists here and there, much to do with food and drink, and (especially for one character) wardrobe. The writing is graceful, not fussy, literate (mostly . . . wait a bit), and time frames are easy to understand. The many biographies are well set throughout the book, and the details are interestingly expressed. The almost-villainous characters have some redeeming features. There is social comment (on adoption, on treating obsessive behavior, on the problems with institutional these-are-our-rules attitudes, on the hungry-for-fodder press). I think of this as a coming-of-age novel, with some overtones of suspense, some of unearthing the mysteries of the past to explain the present, but none of the wilder aspects of (for example) my Vine favorite: NO NIGHT IS TOO LONG (the English translation of a line from the von Hoffmanstal libretto for DER ROSENKAVALIER), which also has a less-than-usual setting in the U.S., for part of the book. I think that Vine is trying something new with GRASSHOPPER, and I found it convincing, if not as outright page-turning, as many of her earlier works have been. I think of this latest effort as being rather like Patricia Highsmith's less-than-suspenseful novels (which are rather in the Graham Green mode), as opposed to, for instance, her marvelous RIPLEY series - and I'm a fan of both. It's good that Vine is not simply writing the same (albeit, satisfying) work over and over, and I must admit that reading this prompts me to say that I'll look forward to the next one. I am distressed, though, that the author does not observe the difference between "awhile" (the adverb) and "a while" (the noun phrase); further, I'm sorry to see that she has fallen into the less-than-laudable habit of using "like" as a conjunction. In these cases, I always ask if one would re-name the Shakespeare play: "Like You Like It"? One more: on page 279, 3rd paragraph, she writes, "But neither of them . . . were" and, of course, the verb should be "was." Where are the editors?

This book is mainly about this 1 girl and she thinks that she isn't cool at all! But then she changes her whole out fit just for other people to like her! She thinks that she will never get a boyfriend, but finally she gets 1! When she thinks that she is finally so cool her mom doesn't like who she is going out with, because he isn't the same religion as her she is Jewish and he isn't! They end up going out any ways she didn't care what her mom said and you will find out the rest when u read it. I don't think that u should read this because this book was really boring but in some parts it was good!

People like Us

This book was about a Jewish girl and her family. Her over coming the pains that she went through in high school, and why her grandparents and mother don't like inter-religion relationships.
When Sarah would go to school every morning, she would always wait to get to her art class because her crush was in that class with her! One day he went up to her and asked if she would like to help with a school project that he was in charge of. She said yes, after thinking about the whole thing for more than three days. They became very good friends and he started to get that little high school crush on her too! He asked her if she would like to go bowling with him and some guys that Friday she went home told her mom and they both were thrilled. After her grandparents heard everything, they asked what religion he was. She didn't know and she told them that but she also knew that he wasn't Jewish. Her mom didn't like the idea of going out with someone that's not the same religion as they were. They didn't want her to start something she couldn't finish.
Overall I did like the book because it brought something in to my life that I would other wise not even think about. It's sad to see someone that may be head over heals for someone else, and they couldn't even get started. I would recommend this book to everyone! I love it!

I found this book to be very boring and most of the time it went slow and hardly had a plot. The characters were boring and not dynamic. This book was on a reading list or I would not have read it not to mention almost all the bookstores in my area did not have this book. I had to order it.

I liked this book. You should read this book if you like to hear people talk. It it had great fire seens, but lacked action.