Once More with Chutzpah

I received an ARC audiobook from Netgalley. I was a little disappointed at the narrator because she was mispronouncing a few things. That, or I have been mispronouncing them for years. The main character is Tally a high school senior and loves musicals. The book is written in Tally's voice. Tally and her twin brother Max iate going through some personal stuff and Tally. She signed them both up through the Synagogue for a trip to Israel hoping it will help her brother. Since "Once More with Chutzpah" is about Jewish high school students traveling to Israel it has some religious and political undertones. There is also an interesting perspective about LGBTQ+ persons in Judaism. There was a part where they walk through Yad Vashem (Israel's Holocaust Museum) and the description was so exact that I felt like I was back in the museum. The conversations between Tally and her tour-mates really came out of my life growing up. They were discussing ways that classmates stereotyped them such as one said "This girl from my high school once asked me if my daddy was going to pay for a new nose when I turned sixteen." and another said "I was told, in temple, that I’m not a real Jew ’cause of the color of my skin. Like you’ve got to be some pasty white dude to read the Torah." I don't want to give away the entire chapter but it was really deep and meanful, and real. The LGBTQ+ part of the story was also really inspiring. It gave a look of pride in Israel vs pride in America. It also described labels and demosexual which I never heard of before but makes sense. Some things that I really liked but might not be understandable to others... I went on a Birthright trip in college and felt that many of the things that Tally experienced reminded me of my personal memories of the trip. Tally's love of Broadway musicals included tons of references from lyrics, to plots, to characters. I love that every chapter was titled after Broadway songs. Chapters like: "On My Own" (Les Mis) "Anybody Have a Map" (Dear Evan Hansen), and "Matchmaker" (Fiddler on the Roof) to name a few. Some fun pop culture references.