Aviva vs the Dybbuk

Mari Lowe's Aviva vs the Dybbuk is a story for 11 year olds about a girl who lives above a mikvah with her mum and a mischievous ghost only she can see.

What happens

Aviva is eleven, two months off her Bas Mitzvah. Her mum, Ema, looks after the little mikvah beside the shul in Beacon, the pool where women come to immerse. Aviva spends her days chasing the dybbuk around it.

He unwraps a visitor's sweets. He tears up a cheque. He turns the signs round so they point people towards wet cement. Everyone else only sees the mess.

Her dad died five years ago, in what everyone calls the accident. Since then Ema has hardly gone out. She turns down every Shabbos invitation, so the friends stopped asking, and their daughters stopped coming too. Kayla, who used to be Aviva's best friend, now can't stand her.

Then the school turns the father-daughter Bas Mitzvah outing into a mother-daughter one. The whole class knows exactly why. A furious game of machanayim (a bit like dodgeball, with four sections) ends with a ball in a girl's face, and Aviva and Kayla are banned from the team and made to plan the outing together.

Aviva is such a real narrator. She's funny and fidgety and she can't sit still in Hebrew class. She's also fiercely protective of her mum. She's sure that if she just doesn't give Ema a reason to shut down, everything will be fine. You'll see how much she's carrying well before she does.

Jewish family life is warm and detailed on the page. There's potato kugel, challah with a shiny glaze and her dad's old stories of dybbuks and gilgulim. Readers who don't know the Hebrew and Yiddish words will pick them up from the way Aviva uses them.

This one is heavier than the title suggests. Ema is depressed, and the book shows it plainly. Aviva wakes to sirens and can hardly breathe for panic. A strange shape appears in the new cement outside the shul, and the next morning the police are there. It's a swastika, and Aviva doesn't even recognise it at first.

It's all handled with real tenderness. For a child who has lost a parent, or whose parent is struggling, it may be a lot to take in. For a reader ready for something honest about grief and friendship, with a ghost story threaded through it, it's very special.

What to read next

For another story about a Jewish child whose school is targeted, try The Do More Club. It follows Josh, the only Jewish kid at his middle school, the weekend after hateful graffiti is sprayed all over the building. It's told in short poems.