The Golden Dreidel

Ellen Kushner's The Golden Dreidel is a magical adventure for 7 year olds about a girl who badly wants a Christmas tree and gets a very odd present instead.

What happens

Sara rides the school bus home past street after street of lit-up houses. People leave their curtains open and she can see straight into their front rooms, where the trees are glittering away. Her own house looks dark and ordinary.

Her mum's answer is short. Jews don't have Christmas trees. End of story.

It's Chanukah, there's a family party at Aunt Leah's that evening, and Sara does not want to go. Her brother Seth is delighted about that.

(If you've ever got a carful of children to a family thing that none of them wanted to attend, this opening will feel very familiar.)

The party itself is brilliantly done. Teenage cousins in a corner being teenagers. Babies putting their hands in the food. All the children hunting down the gold chocolate coins that are supposed to be decorations, then arguing about the rules of the dreidel game, which none of them actually knows properly.

Then a very old lady arrives out of nowhere with an enormous bag and hands out exactly the right present to every child. Sara gets a heavy gold dreidel nearly the size of a book.

She says thank you. She's also crushed.

Tante Miriam then explains what the four sides mean, and warns the children that what they're spinning is miracles. Win everything you can see. Give half away. Nothing changes at all. Or lose the thing you love most, and spin again anyway.

After that there's a scuffle over the dreidel, the television gets broken, nobody will speak to Sara, and later that night the crack in the screen starts to glow and call her name.

What follows is riddles, a strange world and a girl her own age who needs her help.

It's a story rather than a festival explainer, which is the pleasure of it. Nobody stops to teach you anything. You pick up what Chanukah smells and sounds like because you're standing in the middle of the party.

Sara does spend a good while thoroughly ashamed of her own family, and the book doesn't rush to tidy that away.

What to read next

If an ordinary house with a way out of it appeals, The Hidden Stairs and the Magic Carpet is in the library. Eric is meant to be clearing the basement and finds a staircase to somewhere else entirely.