This is great!! I love Iddo Gefen's work, this has a wonderfully quirky, magical realist sensibility that is very cool and a great follow-up to Jerusalem Beach.

Although I would agree that Mrs. Lilienblum’s Cloud Factory is quirky and different, I hesitate to call it funny. In fact it was in parts quite sad. It was a fairly interesting read with expected and confusing family dynamics.

This book is special. It’s quirky and whimsical and funny and ridiculous in the best way. It’s heartfelt.

The Lilienblum family lives in a remote part of the Israeli desert, near the world’s largest erosion crater. Boaz, the father, owns a hostel-like lodge. It’s a tough way to support a family; the trickle of tourists who cross the threshold are lured by the intrigue of a long-unsolved missing person case, not the beauty of the landscape. This Cliff community is seen as backwards and it’s the least likely place for a tech startup to flourish. So naturally, that’s where the story takes us. What follows is a beautiful story about family, love, friendship and finding oneself. That Iddo Gefen manages to tell such a story while satirizing startup culture is pure creative genius.

I loved every moment of this book and wasn’t ready for it to end! Even though it's only March, I can confidently say this will be one of my top reads of the year!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thank you to Astra Publishing House for the ARC. Mrs. Lilienblum’s Cloud Factory will be out 4/1.

What an absolutely delightful odd mix of magical realism and reality. I devoured this book quickly and it kept up late reading into the evenings!

I absolutely loved Iddo Gefen's first book, Jerusalem Beach, and was elated to hear that he was coming out with a second. Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory is a worthy sophomore effort and I'd highly recommend it.

The novel focuses on the Lilienblum family: Sarai, the enigmatic matriarch and title character; her husband Boaz; and their two children Eli and Naomi. Naomi has moved away from their small town in the desert to pursue a career in tech, while Eli, somewhat adrift in life, has remained behind to help his father run their family's hostel. After Naomi returns during a family crisis, tension develops between her and Eli, driven by the differences in the siblings' lives and choices. This tension not only propels the narrative forward, but underpins the central themes of the novel: rural vs. urban, past vs. future, and idealism vs. capitalism.

While I think that Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory is less philosophically incisive than the best stories from Jerusalem Beach, it still left me with plenty to consider. The book is quite whimsical, with elements reminiscent of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Wes Anderson's Asteroid City, but underpinned by a deep melancholy.

Lastly, the prose was excellent. While I haven't the capacity to compare it to the original text, I believe that the translator, Daniella Zamir, did a fantastic job.

As my life gets busier, there are fewer and fewer authors whose new books I will buy no-questions-asked. Gefen is definitely on this list, and I envision him remaining there for as long he continues to write. Thank you to Astra House and NetGalley for the advanced copy!

Ah, gosh. I wanted to like this one, but I really just couldn't get into it.
I am still really thankful to the publisher, author, and Netgalley -- but this one just wasn't for me.

What a quirky weird book and I say this with great admiration.

I love stories centred around families and this is a really fun one, while I didn’t quite find it satirical I did still really enjoy it and found the humor solid. This is also translated so sometimes I do think satire gets lost in mix.

A few plot pieces could of used some toughening up but overall a really wonderful read.

This is my second Gefen book (also translated by Daniella Zamir, who again did a great job) and it is delightfull. A mix of magical realism, some fantasy and some scifi, it blends into an odd story but in a good way.
Eli is a 22 y old living in what was meant to be a ski resort in the south of Israel. His father runs a hostel nearby, and his mother is an inventor. She stumbles on a way to make sand into water. Together with his sister, the four form a start up “Cloudies”.
Because of them working together and some of their earlier memories and experiences revealed, it shows very layered and universal themes within families.
The book has a nice languid pace, but not too slow. As readers we get to peel back a layer of the proverbial onion, so with every chapter things make a little more sense. It also poses very interesting philosophical questions on ethics, personal vs group responsibilities. Delightfully atmospheric.

This was such an exiting read. From the contrasting personalities of the Lilienblum’s to their dynamics as a family, everything seemed very intriguing. The subplots created real life-like chaos. I loved that. As well as the secondary characters and everything they added to the story. Not only did the narrative provide a constant sense of intimacy (it truly felt like i was witnessing everything unfold) but it also showed the different ways all of the family members experience life itself and the lengths they are willing to go for each other.
I’m looking forward to read more of Iddo Gefen’s works.

*Thanks to NetGalley and Astra Publishing House for the ARC.

I had high hopes for this book, the premise is so imaginative and witty. Unfortunately I couldn’t get into it and I didn’t care for the characters much. It does have a great cover and I am sure it willl be enjoyed by our patrons.

This book doesn't really satirizes the less savory and preachy aspects of the corporate tech world, but it's mostly about how different family members Come together to make their dreams come true in a tumultuous climate (figuratively and literally) while trying to achieve financial stability. I appreciate the intent and the foreshadowing, the execution is muddled by too many subplots making the overall experience feel only okay. There’s just too much happening and I’m not sure all these elements were necessary for the story to work. The ending also feels very fairy-tale-like, and I think Naomi was the only fully developed character in the entire family, which is a bit disappointing.

Quirky and original. A recommended purchase for collections where offbeat fiction is popular. Will likely appeal to readers of Robin Sloan.

3.5 rounded up to 4

Inventor Sarai Lilienblum disappears from her family-run lodge, to be later found in the middle of a crater in the southern Israeli desert, drinking Martini in a bathrobe. Her newest invention, a repurposed vacuum cleaner which promises to turn desert sand into rain clouds, goes viral through social media, and from that point on, the whole family commits to build a start-up to achieve the production of the cloud factory on a larger scale.

This one is the story of a family, of sacrifices made for the sake of the unity of the family: we have Mrs. Lilienblum, a talented inventor who gives up on her career dreams to follow her husband in opening a touristic lodge in a little village in the desert; Naomi, the eldest daughter, who quits her successful job in Tel Aviv to support her family in building this start-up; Boaz, the father, whose sacrifice will be clearer towards the end; and finally, Eli, the narrator (the story is in third person, but the focalisation is internal) who sacrifices his personality to please the other members of his family.

The novel is labelled as "comic", which I somewhat agree, especially when describing the building of the start-up (which is a hell of a mess at the beginning, reflecting the chaos the protagonists brings to the party) and the ruthless world of venture capitals and business angels (whose aim is not to foster creativity or the possibility of a better world, but rather -surprise- more money). I greatly appreciated this satirical approach.

What I had some issues with are the characters. We have Sarai who, once she's in the start-up, completely avoids responsibility (ok, understandable when you have the whole picture, but she made my eyes roll quite a few times); then Boaz and Naomi, who are one the mirror image of the other, they both left me disappointed in the end.

Eli is a passive narrator: aside from his active endeavours to solve the mystery of McMurphy (and OH BOY did he solve it... *sad face* *screaming*), he's quite passive in the start-up. Everybody does things behind his back, despite him being the co-founder, so most of the times he's a spectator I felt some pity for.

Overall, the characters are perfectly imperfect, which I think was the aim. Does that mean that I liked them? Not necessarily. (taste!)

I commend Gefen's writing style, as the story could have induced excessive pathos in some places, but he managed to beautifully tell this story without useless pleasantries.

I think this upcoming title will sit well with readers who enjoy a contemporary family story. It’s a bit of a stretch for me to agree with this book’s classification as a satire. While there are some elements of poking fun at tech startups that I was originally drawn too, I did not find them to be particularly deep or interesting.

Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory is quite lighthearted, and has some nice buildup around a hiker’s disappearance at the beginning of the novel. I think the author tried to take on a few too many throughlines, however. In particular, the introduction of magical realism via shared dreaming did not lead anywhere, nor did it add anything to the plot. As a result of trying to take on too much, I think the book struggled to wrap up in the end, and some characters’ stories ended rather abruptly.

Thank you to NetGalley and Astra Publishing House for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review! Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory is scheduled to be published in April.

I thought I’d enjoy this but I ended up finding it boring. I found I was avoiding picking it up and reading is not supposed to feel like a chore.
Hopefully your experience is different to mine.

This book was pretty good. I think it was a little bit dance at times, but it had lots of good tips and information for people interested in setting up their own start up company. I think it was entertaining and a very insightful.

Thank you to NetGalley, to the author, and to the publisher for this complementary ARC in exchange for my honest review!!!