What a charming little book! When I picked this up for the Reading Rush, I didn’t realise it was a memoir so knew nothing about Etgar Keret, but I found that I adore his writing style. It was a very witty and funny book with dark undertones from the atmosphere and constant threat of war and bombings, and overall a great little read.

I really fell in love with all of the characters, including his wife with all her wonderful personality traits, his father who we only meet briefly before he passes away, and even the various taxi drivers we meet throughout. Keret really has a great way of making you love every character he introduces and seeing each of their quirks.

The book was told through a series of short chapters, which I loved and meant I raced through it, within bigger sections for each year of his son’s life up to age 7. It was great to see him growing up and how soon his personality started to shine through.

I don’t have a huge amount to say on this, but I did really love it, and it even opened my eyes to the conflict happening at that time which I had never heard about from a perspective such as this of the person experiencing it themselves, even if not directly. It was also interesting to me to see how his son, even just at 3 years old, was already being discussed in the context of war, a really terrifying thought.

Overall, I really would recommend anyone give this a go as a short little book which explodes with charisma. Wonderfully written.

For the reading rush, this book fitted a number of prompts: book the colour of my birthstone, book that starts with “the”, book that takes place on a different continent than where you live, book completely outside of your house (slightly cheated as this isn’t really possible at the moment so I read it all in the same place, as I’ve seen to be a common prompt in a number of other readathons)