Idgie Says:Educational, interesting, gripping stories - what more do you need! I hooked into the story of Maximo a little more than Stealing a Summer's afternoon, but they both engaged me immediately upon opening to the first chapter. The characters are real, the emotions ring true and the story lines grab you.
I really enjoy novels like this because, while telling a strong story, they also give you real glimpses into other's cultures and lives - things you might never know about otherwise as you don't encounter them in your everyday life.
I found the way A.J. Sidransky told a good tale, while educating the reader on so many aspects of Jewish culture - without ever becoming preachy, to be fantastic. These were real characters, simply living their lives where circumstances happen to draw a reader in and keep them.
I thought both these books well worth the read.
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Published by: Berwick Court
Both Available Now
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Stealing A Summer's Afternoon
Authored by A. J. Sidransky
Elliot Serlin is having the worst week of his life. First, he learns that he has lost his entire savings, including his son's college tuition, to the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. Then he stumbles upon a file at work marked SECRET and learns he is going to lose his job. Desperate to avoid financial ruin, and unwilling to tell his wife for fear she'll leave him, Elliot sets out planning an elaborate, if not quite foolproof, art heist. Along the way, he will recruit a salsa-dancing ex-con, a 19-year-old hacker, his best friend, and his wife's best friend who, it turns out, has eyes for him. Not least among the seemingly insurmountable obstacles Elliot must overcome is his own ego.
Stealing a Summer's Afternoon is a farcical page-turner that showcases the same storytelling prowess that readers loved in AJ Sidransky's debut novel, Forgiving Maximo Rothman. But Stealing A Summer's Afternoon features much more of Sidransky's prodigious wit than could fit into the sentimental pages of his first novel.
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Forgiving Maximo RothmanAuthored by A. J. Sidransky
On a chilly autumn night in New York, the lives of two men born decades and continents apart collide when Max Redmond is found bludgeoned in his Washington Heights apartment. While investigating the crime, Detective Tolya Kurchenko comes across the dead man's diaries, written by Redmond over four decades. He hopes the diaries will lead him to the killer. In fact, they help him sort out the complexities of his own identity.
Spanning 65 years and three continents - from Hitler's Europe to the decaying Soviet Empire of the 1970s, and revealing the little-known history of Sosua, a Jewish settlement in the jungles of the Dominican Republic - A. J. Sidransky's debut novel leads us into worlds long gone, and the lives of people still touched by those memories.
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AJ's first book, Forgiving Maximo Rothman was selected by the National Jewish Book Awards as a finalist for Outstanding Debut Fiction.