melanie braverman

East Justice is a small fictional town in rural Iowa, which harbors a tiny enclave of Jewish families. Among them lives Grace, a young woman with the cauterized “tongue of a bird,” farmer, quilter, and keeper of family secrets.
 
Through a succession of lucid scenes delivered in the measured pace of true memory, Grace tells her own coming of age story in a language evocative of the rolling Midwestern landscape. What emerges is a sometimes dream-like family saga, peopled with characters both human and not: an immigrant grandmother, an absent father, an unhappy mother, a family home, a small prolific farm.
 
A novel of loss and recovery, East Justice reads like a long drive among the hills. Braverman’s richly textured prose and clear, searching eye delivers to us an American Midwest that is varied, beautiful, and dramatic for its simplicity, infusing the secret rituals of daily life with meaning and light.