A fresh take on Jewish folklore meets modern life in this contemporary story. Eve Goodman, approaching 40 and grieving her father's death, accidentally creates a golem while navigating multiple crises: her influencer sister's wedding, potential job loss, and rising antisemitism in Chicago. The novel balances serious themes with humor, particularly in scenes where Eve attempts to integrate her clay-formed companion into modern society. While handling heavy topics like grief, religious persecution, and family dynamics, the story maintains levity through situations like the golem's coffee addiction and wedding preparation mishaps. It offers pointed commentary on social media culture and superficial relationships while exploring how different family members process loss.

The audiobook really brought this story to life. I loved listening to this book over the first couple nights of Hanukkah!

This was a darkly funny literary debut that's more women's fiction than romance per se but had excellent Jewish rep and told the messy story of a single 40 year old woman determined to find a date to her sister's holiday wedding. Good on audio narrated by Gail Shalan and perfect for fans of other Golem stories like Jean Meltzer's A magical meet cute. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an early audio copy in exchange for my honest review!

TW: grief over the death of a parent, alcohol over consumption

📚 #BOOKREVIEW 📚
I Made It Out of Clay by Beth Kander
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / Pages: 346 / Genre: Fiction
Audiobook Narrator: Gail Shalan
Duration: 9 hours 47 minutes
Release Date: December 10, 2024

Because this happens during the holiday season and although the main character and her family are all Jewish, I’m counting this as one of my favorite holiday reads of all time. Second only to Christina Lauren’s In a Holidaze.

Eve is turning 40 the day after her younger sister’s wedding, which is during the holiday season. Although Eve is Jewish, she and her late father always enjoyed all the cheerfulness that the Christmas season brings—delighting in joining in with ugly Hanukkah sweaters and proudly noting that all the best Christmas songs were written by Jewish songwriters. It’s been a year since her father suddenly passed away and she’s grieving pretty hard without really realizing it. Instead, she’s focusing on how annoying her family is and stressing over not having a date for the wedding. Remembering a story her bubbe told her about creating a golem to protect them from the Nazis, somehow in a drunken stupor, Eve creates one to bring to the wedding. What follows is hilarious but also thrillingly scary chaos.

This holiday read has it all—humor, grief, magic, family drama, Christmas and Hanukkah spirit, and so much more. I really loved this story and all the characters in it.

Thank you, @BethKander, @HTP_Hive, @Harlequin_Audio, and @NetGalley for my free copy of the audiobook, which, by the way, Gail Shalan did a terrific job narrating.

I Made It Out of Clay by Beth Kander is a darkly comedic yet unexpectedly poignant exploration of grief, family, and the desire to control one’s chaotic life. The novel follows Eve, a woman in her forties struggling with loneliness, anxiety, and the recent loss of her father. In a desperate bid to escape her reality, she brings a golem to life, hoping it will offer her the rom-com fantasy she longs for. Kander’s writing shines in its wit and emotional depth, balancing humor with profound moments of reflection. The golem, both protective and strangely appealing, adds a fantastical twist to the story, keeping readers entertained as Eve’s well-intentioned escape plan spirals into something far more unsettling. The novel deftly explores themes of loss, family dynamics, and self-acceptance, with an intriguing mix of supernatural and real-world struggles.

However, while the premise of I Made It Out of Clay is unique and compelling, the pacing occasionally falters, especially as the novel veers into darker territory. Some readers may find the transition from lighthearted rom-com fantasy to more intense and eerie moments a bit jarring. Additionally, the characters, though relatable in their flaws, sometimes feel underdeveloped, particularly Eve’s family, whose emotional distance adds to her turmoil but doesn’t feel fully explored. Despite these minor issues, the novel’s originality and the blend of humor with deeper emotional themes make it a memorable and thought-provoking read. I Made It Out of Clay will resonate with readers who appreciate a mix of the fantastical and the real, wrapped in a story that challenges the idea of perfection and embraces the messiness of life.

I read an ARC the book a few months ago and enjoyed it very much. I was excited to have a chance to revisit the story via audiobook. Gail Shalan did a fabulous job with all the voices. Here's my review from when I read the book:

.....

Meet Eve Goodman. She’s about to turn 40 and her younger sister is getting married. Eve has been mourning the sudden death of her father for a year now and is trying to get her act back together. Eve, her mother and her sister have all been handling their grief in completely different ways. Eve “threw herself into work, started eating everything in sight, and stopped making any decisions.”

Between the pressure from the upcoming family wedding (her sister is a well-known TikTok influencer and has been posting lots of wedding-related videos) and expected layoffs at her Chicago marketing agency, Eve is stressed. Her best friends have also been acting a bit oddly and she doesn’t know why. In addition to all this, she’s faced with the upturn in antisemitism, both around the world and right there in Chicagoland. In fact, her family’s synagogue has just had a bomb threat (that turned out to be a false alarm) and she is verbally assaulted for being Jewish while on a Chicago train ride, while wearing one of those “ugly Christmas/Hanukkah sweaters” in honor of the season. So Eve is very stressed. Not a spoiler due to the title of the book - while drunk she somehow manages to create a golem.

For anyone who doesn’t know what a golem is - it is an animated, anthropomorphic being in Jewish folklore, which is created entirely from inanimate matter, usually clay or mud. (Thank you to Wikipedia for this brief definition.) Its purpose is to protect the Jewish people. It doesn’t have free will but will do whatever its master/mistress tells it to do. (A mixed blessing, as you may imagine.) This particular golem is rather handsome and Eve is determined to bring this golem as her Plus One to her sister’s wedding. The scenes of her shopping for appropriate clothing for him and dining out with him were pretty funny. This golem LOVED coffee!

There are some really wonderful observations about everyday modern life, social media, etc. “It’s so easy to just keep things surface level. Do a cursory check-in, hit the proverbial like button, and just move on.”

(Quotes are from an advance readers copy and may be changed in the final, published book.)
....

Thank you to Harlequin Audio for the chance to listen to the audio version of I Made It Out Of Clay by Beth Kander

What a unique premise and tale! I have not been lucky enough to read many stories where the main characters and plot are jewish, and the idea of a gollum is something I havent gotten to read before. I really liked how this story felt very rooted in reality despite the religious/magical elements of the gollem. I thought it was both funny, heartwarming, and quite relatable.

Honestly this book was really hard to get through. Eve is just a very depressing character and complains constantly. I understand she is still grieving her father’s passing but she literally complains about everything and everyone. She also starts seeing her grandmother in everything, who passed away long ago, so she takes her advice to make a golem and that was a very uncomfortable situation. I wanted to like this book but it just wasn’t for me.

The narration was great and definitely fit the tone of the character.

Beth Kander has written such a powerful, moving and at-times, incredibly funny, book on grief, love, acceptance, and how it's so entirely human to make mistakes. I loved learning about Jewish tradition, faith and culture. The audiobook narration was terrific too!

I am not Jewish but I am a woman and I love Jewish literature. This particular book made me laugh and cry. Paul Mudd! Hahah!
Eve is suffering badly. She is in a dark place. Her father just died, she is turning 40 the day after her sisters wedding, her job is firing her besties, and she can't seem to find a date. She is also dealing with antisemitism.
After asking her hot neighbor Josh to come to the wedding, she goes home and makes herself a man out of clay.
He is hot and huge. She only has a few days to teach him about the world, but keep in mind that she is jaded and all sorts of cranky. Her attitude is frustrating everyone who loves her. She is also acting weird to Hot Josh.
When she lost Paul Mudd I was so scared for her!
I love the knowledge from her grandma and her best friend. I loved learning about Golem. The narration was perfect! I love the ending!

I wholeheartedly recommend this book to everyone, as it offers valuable lessons about survival, both literal and emotional. What makes it even more engaging is the perfect balance it strikes between these serious themes and a lighthearted, humorous tone. The author skillfully weaves humor into moments of tension, making the lessons feel accessible and enjoyable rather than heavy or preachy. It’s an entertaining read that not only teaches important life lessons but also leaves you with a smile.

This is going to be one of those reviews where I write AROUND the book more than I write ABOUT the book, because my reaction was considerably more about the issues it raised than it was about the content – and that’s saying something because I have more than a few of those as well. Just that some of those issues are ‘me’ things that may or may not be ‘you’ things.

As always, your reading mileage may absolutely vary, so in this particular case I’m pleased that I have an excerpt from the book to include so that you can judge for yourself whether this will turn out to be a book for you.

I have an additional reason for including the excerpt. I want you to have a chance to see what the book actually IS, rather than what the blurb says it is. Because that’s very much a case of never the twain shall meet.

As the story opens, Eve’s life is far, far, far from being a rom-com. Also, the story is neither darkly funny nor sweet, surprisingly or otherwise. And she doesn’t create the golem until nearly the halfway point of things.

But the story is dark, because Eve’s is in the middle of a long, dark night of the soul. Her beloved father died suddenly just barely a year ago as this Hanukkah story opens, and she’s still utterly devastated. She’s never gotten over the death of grandmother a few years previously, so she’s grieving double while her mother and sister both seem to be breezing along. She has few friends, she’s terribly lonely, and she’s eating her feelings constantly. As if that weren’t enough, her employer is hinting strongly at layoffs AFTER the holidays if not before.

In other words, Eve is in a pit and hasn’t stopped digging. It’s hard to read about just how terrible she’s feeling and how much depression she’s dragging around.

Which is where the audiobook, read marvelously by Gail Shalan, made things worse for me personally because she did such a terrific job as the narrator. When a story is written in the first person perspective, and it’s narrated by someone who is a great match for the character, I get a bit too deeply caught up in the character’s emotions.

And that’s what happened in I Made It Out of Clay. Not just because Eve and I are both Jewish, but because her Chicago neighborhood is where I used to live, her parents’ synagogue is in the town where I used to work and I lost my own father exactly the same way she did. It all got a bit too close – at least before she magicked up that golem – and I got so into her problems they were depressing me.

So my feelings about the story went to places that the author couldn’t possibly have known or intended, but absolutely did affect my reading and listening of it.

The story does get, well, livelier, for lack of a better term, and does head into the sort of horror-adjacent dark I was expecting from that blurb, once the golem arrives on the scene. Eve’s frantic efforts to disguise her wedding date as a real person and not a magical construct gave the story a lot more oomph than it had up to that point.

But I was too mired in her depression to see whatever funny or sweet parts there might be until the very, very end.

Escape Rating C: If you’re looking for this to be a Hanukkah-themed romantic comedy based on that blurb, you’re going to be in for a bit of disappointment. Instead, II would recommend you take a look at Love You a Latke by Amanda Elliot, Eight Nights to Win Her Heart by Miri White to fill that particular holiday craving and Magical Meet Cute by Jean Meltzer if you think your Hanukkah romance reading won’t be complete without at least one golem among your eight nights of presents.

Rounded to 4.5 stars.

CONTENT WARNING: grief, death of a parent (off-page), antisemitism, violence

I first learned about this book on Jinstagram (the Jewish corner of Instagram) and absolutely had to read it. A Jewish book featuring a golem with humor? Bestill my Jewish heart. I had high hopes going into this, and this story far exceeded them.

This book had such an appealing summary that I couldn’t wait to start reading. Reading Jewish books featuring golems are a secret weakness of mine; they’re an endless source of fascination to me. A golem is referenced in the Middle Ages and was intended to protect Jewish people from a threat, and continues to hold a place in Ashkenazi folklore.

I loved the plot. It has a current of dark humor running throughout the story, and has mingled periods of joy and pain. Although it was a really funny book, Kander also touches on some heavy themes throughout the story, mainly grief and antisemitism, and she handles the topics beautifully. Eve’s grief has taken over her life after her father’s death, and she felt like her father and her bubbe (Yiddish for grandmother) were the only people that really got who she was, leaving her disconnected from her mother and sister. But what most impressed me was Eve’s character arc and how she worked through her emotions and grief, and even her fears. Not being able to process her grief with her family was exceptionally difficult on Eve, who was so detached from any supports in the family. On top of all of that, her life is basically imploding due to her repressing her grief and outside situations that she has no control over. It would make sense that she’d find something to exert control over, and it turned out to be a golem.

After reading this on audiobook, I loved Gail Shalan’s narration. She did wonderful accents, particularly for Eve’s flashbacks to things her grandmother said or did. The only thing I didn’t like about the book was the way the narrator pronounced Hebrew words. She made them sound unfamiliar and exotic. While reciting the blessing over the Chanukah candles, Shalan mispronounced it. While she was able to read the words, she struggled to make the ‘ch’ sound and used the ‘h’ sound instead, such as when saying challah as opposed to hallah. The Chanukah prayers are said for eight consecutive nights, every single year, so having a narrator that couldn’t pronounce certain words took me out of the story.

There are romantic elements in the story, along with the humor, which is why it’s labeled as a ‘darkly funny rom-com,’ but that isn’t all it is. There’s also a lot of emotional baggage involved with Eve, and she’s easy to love as her life feels like it’s crumbling around her. I cringed at more than a couple of interactions between Eve and her crush, but she was perfectly fine when talking to anyone else.

Despite the romance, this is a closed door read with not so much spice to it, so it can also appeal to readers of clean romance. There is LGBTQ representation, with Eve’s sister marrying a woman, and one of her two best friends is a married gay man, and the other is a Black Jewish woman.

Overall, that was a tiny blip on an otherwise incredible story. Judaism is a closed religion, and since we’re such a small part (0.2%) of the world’s population, many people have never met a Jewish person or learned about our ethnoreligion. Kander did an outstanding job of making Jewish traditions and holidays accessible to people outside of our communities. She explains the meaning of the Yiddish and Hebrew words that pop up throughout the story. With her sister’s wedding looming, Eve decides to find out why the groom traditionally breaks a glass at the end of the wedding, and it is so indicative of Judaism—we celebrate joy at every opportunity, but even on a day that is hyped as the happiest of our lives, we have a symbolic reminder of our people’s pain. I can’t say enough great things about this book, but don’t rely on the pronunciation of Hebrew and Yiddish words in the audiobook version. I highly recommend this book, and rather than specify an audience, I’m just going to say everyone should read it!