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I started this retelling of “Sleeping Beauty�� immediately after finishing City of Thieves , and I was fully expecting to be transported to a radically different world. Imagine my surprise when this book picked up more or less where the last had left off �� in the Soviet Union (albeit the 1970’s, not post-war). I got to the enchanted forest eventually, but it took a couple of chapters.

The book is a fusion of the fairy tales of Sleeping Beauty and Baba Yaga, the baby-eating witch of Russian folklore. Our handsome prince is Ivan, a Jewish boy born in the Soviet Union who defects to America with his family at age ten and returns to the Ukraine as a grad student after the fall of communism. The sleeping beauty he awakens from her millennium-long dream is Princess Katerina, but before they can live happily ever after, they have to go back to the 9th century and defeat Baba Yaga. The book is action-packed, romantic, and thoroughly addictive, but from the point of view of a religious Jew, it’s absolutely worth skipping.

The main problem with the book �� surprise, surprise �� are it’s inaccuracies in its portrayal of Jews. Princess Katerina lives in the period when Christianity was first gaining a foothold in Europe, and I have no trouble believing that she and her subjects pray and confess like Christians yet still dabble in witchcraft and occasionally invoke the names of pagan gods. Old habits die hard. But Jews were never pagans. Tanach is full of warnings to the Jews to stop their idol worship, but that was in the ancient period. When Prince Casmir invited the Jews to Poland, he allowed them religious freedom, and thus grew the very insular communities of Eastern European Jewry. The pagan beliefs of their neighbors were no temptation for Jews, so all plot twists with Ivan and his family simply did not ring true. Orson Scott Card, himself a Mormon, probably doesn’t know the difference, but any religious Jew would, and most would find the Jewish characters offensive.

I think I’m going to create a new shelf called “Regrettable Reads.�� The addictively good writing of this book deserves at least a 4, but for the portrayal of the Jews, it loses one, and even that may be too little. Frum friends who love fantasy, don’t read this. You won’t be missing anything you can’t get elsewhere, sans the anti-Semitism.