The Weight of Words

By MARGO RABB

The Weight of the Sky
By Lisa Ann Sandell
304 pages. Viking Juvenile. $16.99.

Reading Lisa Ann Sandell’s The Weight of the Sky, a heartfelt, affecting novel about a sixteen-year-old girl’s first trip to Israel and how it changes her life, brought back memories of my first trip to Israel when I was nineteen: the magical feel of Jerusalem, with its ancient stones and staggering history; the ubiquitous tomato and cucumber salads swimming in olive oil and lemon juice; the 4:30 am kibbutz wakeup call; the kibbutz’s dinner of pink yogurt, bread, and raw vegetables; the shock of seeing massive machine guns casually slung over young soldiers’ shoulders everywhere; and the often mystifying relationship between the Israelis and Palestinians. Sandell also successfully captures the surprise and joy of what it feels like for an American Jew to be, for the first time, in a place where Jews are the majority, where the entire country celebrates the Jewish Sabbath. She shows the profound and often confusing effect that Israel can have on a Jewish person’s life.

What makes The Weight of the Sky particularly unique is that it’s a novel in free verse. I hadn’t read a novel in verse in many years, and the ones I have read are primarily of the ancient Greek variety, or sonnet sequences such as Marilyn Hacker’s beautiful and unforgettable Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons.The poetry of Sandell’s novel isn’t in a classical form; it’s a narrative free verse that’s a bit like prose, with line breaks every few words; if the line breaks were taken out, many of the sentences would read like traditional prose. It’s a form that isn’t easy to carry off, but Sandell does it very well.

Sandell is at her best when she describes the little details of Israeli life: prayer notes falling out of the Western Wall when Sarah, the narrator, tries to stick her note in; Sarah’s difficulty in understanding Israeli Hebrew, which is so different from what she studied in Hebrew school; and the strange cultural pull she feels for this homeland. Even though Sarah isn’t particularly religious—she’s unsure of her own faith in God, and though her family is kosher, and goes to synagogue twice a year, she says that “I sense/for my parents it’s more about/tradition than/spirituality/or faith”—being in Israel is the first time she feels a sense of belonging. In Jerusalem, Sarah states:

The city breathes, and I can feel its heart beat
I’ve only just arrived, I know, but I am part of this
     humming,
this living.
And there has been life here for so long.
Jewish life.
Life that nursed me and cursed me,
leaving me marked in school.
The Jew.
Every fall,
when the other kids are
warming up for football practice or field hockey,
I’m in a dress sitting next to my parents
in the synagogue
for those alien Jewish holidays.

Sandell also powerfully describes Sarah’s coming of age—her first kiss, her first boyfriend, the first time she feels accepted by the group of older teens and early-twenty-somethings who work on the kibbutz. Sarah is an articulate narrator, mature enough to recognize how young she is, and how much she has yet to learn, and how she’s not ready to have sex yet:

I know a lot of the kids
in my school
do it,
but it feels
        I feel
like it’s wrong
        for me
now.
It’s what older people
        who aren’t my parents
do.

I read The Weight of the Sky in two ways: as my former teenage self, who would’ve loved it unabashedly, and as a slightly jaded (though trying not to be) adult reader. Both the teenage reader and the adult reader in me enjoyed the book very much. The adult side, however, recognized that a novel in verse is not for every reader, and I imagine young adults might be more open-minded than some adult readers to a novel in poetry. Very few poetry books, novels or not, are published by large adult publishing houses, who take as their credo that poetry simply does not sell. It’s a credit to both young adult publishers, and young adult readers, that they seem to be more open to the poetic form.

Credit is due to writers who take risks as well, and who are willing to write narrative free verse, a form that gives so much weight to individual words that it can seem cloying or overdone. But Sandell’s writing never hits a false note. It’s honest and sincere, and The Weight of the Sky should be required reading for any young woman going to Israel for the first time, or any adult reader who would love to revisit that early life-altering experience.