Bottle in the Gaza Sea »

Seventeen-year-old Tal Levine of Jerusalem, despondent over the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, puts her hopes for peace in a bottle and asks her brother, a military nurse in the Gaza Strip, to toss it into the sea, leading ultimately to friendship and understanding between her and an "enemy."

VOYA

AGERANGE: Ages 11 to 18.

Tal, a seventeen-year-old girl from Jerusalem, places a message in a bottle that she gives to her older brother to deposit in Gaza while on military duty. Naim, a twenty-year-old Palestinian boy, finds the message and writes to Tal's e-mail address, starting the correspondence that makes up most of this book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The disparities in their lives, the cultural differences, and the contemporary events that make up their surroundings come across in the messages, placing a human face on the conflict and giving the characters hope for peace and reconciliation. A sense of frustration at the wasted talents of bright young people living in this contentious region is embedded in the story. Two familiar traditions, those of pen pals and of novels composed of letters, are present in the book, and they serve to bring large issues down to a personal level and of encourage readers to follow in Tal's tracks. The novel is short, but the e-mail messages are long and drag on at times. The author and translator would have benefited from better exposure to the style of writing that has developed on the Internet. Teachers will find this book useful in the classroom, but it will appeal to few leisure readers aside from those interested in international issues. Reviewer: Jenny Ingram
April 2008 (Vol. 31, No. 1)