It was such a good idea.  Take a privileged and slightly self-absorbed Israeli neurosurgeon with a beautiful wife and two children he adores, and plunge him – through a moment’s carelessness and bad luck – into an underworld of poor immigrants and petty criminals he didn’t know existed.  Use it to highlight the chasms that routinely divide near neighbors: the rich from the poor, the carelessly affluent from those that clean their houses, serve their meals, and take care of their kids.  Cast a bright light on the separateness that’s now routine in profoundly divided societies, our inability to see truthfully what’s under our noses. Mix it all up in a thriller-style story set in today’s Israel, a place of profound and deeply ironic discrimination.  It sounds like a winner, right?

Well, yes and no.  Waking Lions is Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s second novel and the first she’s published in the US.  She’s written an ambitious and deeply felt book, but it’s clear she’s still learning her craft.  The narrative perspective moves around, sometimes clumsily, leaving the reader feel unclear whose story this really is.  There are too many indulgent, reflective passages that lessen the overall impact of what could have been a much harder-hitting tale.