Night Owls
by A. R. Vishny
High School    Harper/HarperCollins    368 pp.
9/24    9780063327306    $19.99
e-book ed.  9780063327320    $10.99

Clara and Molly are posing as young women who run the Grand Dame in New York City’s East Village, a movie house that started life as a Yiddish theater. In fact, the sisters are two undead Estries, feeding off the blood of the living. Clara’s rules: No romance. Only feed on Jews. The latter is to protect the Jewish community from blood libel (the false accusation that Jews use the blood of Christians for ritual purposes), the former to protect themselves from entanglements that would lead to their discovery and eradication. But Molly has a secret girlfriend who has become possessed by some sort of entity, and Clara…well, her relationship with their scapegrace ticket seller Boaz, who can see ghosts, is fraught. In a story that begins with small stakes and grows through successive iterations of drama to a showdown against Ashmodai, Prince of Demons, the details of the legacy of Jewish theater are engaging, and the strongly drawn romantic embroilments even more compelling. Film history weaves through the characters’ interests and becomes inseparable from the enchantments that drive the action. Subplots, flashbacks, and bits of Jewish folkloric backstory strengthen the narrative drive, making this complex but accessible queer-Jewish-vampire rom-com thriller a hit on all fronts. An author’s note provides historical background.

From the ">November/December 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.