Weary of the usual bookstore fare? There's a book out there to tell you a story you have not heard before, which no reader of John Grisham can say. It's nice to read a first novel that makes you wait impatiently for the author's next work. The Bone Weaver by Victoria Zackheim starts off with neurotic Mimi, an academic mourning the death of her best friend - nearly her only friend. She chafes at what she sees as the insensitivities of her mother Rivka, who barely registers a ripple at the loss her daughter is feeling. Mimi can hardly seem to breathe she so misses the advice that Sarah, the lost friend and sounding board, gave her.

Interspersed with Mimi's life almost totally alone in LA are the stories of Rivka's clan. Rivka's grandmother and family live in a community of Jews forced out of the mainstream of society near Warsaw. The pogroms just beyond the horizon fill one with a sense of dread, given what the coming 20th century will end up doing to the Jews in Poland. But the shtetl village is a living organism.

There is a stark contrast between the Mimi chapters, where she lives a solitary life in modern LA, pushing away one living friend she has, berated by the deceased Sarah in her mind. She thinks of her mother Rivka trying to pry out the tale of her life understand her own.

It was this very silence that was pushing Mimi forward, urging her to uncover and comprehend all those things that her mother refused to tell.

Four generations of women, she thought, and I am the last. Malka, Fredl, Rivka, and me. And not the last to date, but the last ever. An only child, a woman with no children; the end of the line. Malka, Fredl, Rivka, Mimi. Period. If only she could understand why it ended here.

Malka, the great-grandmother to Mimi, dwells in Nowy Zycie, near Warsaw. The clan makes the best of life they can, with hints around the edges of the dangers that gradually close in around them. A book-loving daughter, Fredl, is not pleased to learn she is to be given away in an arranged marriage, but a twist takes the story to places not expected. At times it felt as if the story from Nowy Zycie was utterly alien to Mimi's modern isolation. But the severely limited choices faced by the elder generations, where they made the best life they could, makes all the more strange Mimi's inability to decide on a course, given her freedoms. Zackheim manages to capture living inside of not just grief, but shock; Mimi wonders if she has lived half a life, with Sarah living the rest for her. Delving into the past seems to give her something to hold onto.

In Nowy Zycie, Zackheim describes the lives of the clan engagingly, from the great-grandfather extending too much credit to his beleaguered neighbours to Malka worrying over hot embers at night. They plan, they live, they struggle mightily to make their children's lives happy. The tale becomes so entrancing that the flashes back to modern day LA at times are unwelcome, unless considered as a single thread of life leading to Mimi. As this builds, it gives added gravity to Mimi's drift, contemplating all the sorrow of her ancestors that have built a wall around her mother.