Exemplary Girls / Blao Shahra A coming-of-age novel with a dark myth at its heart. At the studio in Bnei Brak, Chava Keller, an ambitious girl who knows nothing escapes her dark and intelligent eyes, prepares to rehearse a fateful play, which casts its long shadow over her life. When one of the young actresses disappears, violent echoes from the past rumble through the school corridors and threaten all those who wanted so badly to be exemplary girls. With age, the terror of emerging sexuality and the pain of repressed passions, as well as the tyranny, coercion and cruelty that only a closed female society is capable of, intertwine and twist in the content of the play. Its plot, based on the wills of ninety-three schoolgirls from Krakow, who committed suicide together in order not to be defiled by the Nazi soldiers, follows the lives of its participants. The voice of the dead girls emanates from the distance of time and place, and with it also the sounds of the collision between the true and the false and between fiction and reality. In her second book, Model Girls, Shahra Blaau continues to examine Jewish myths in her unique and powerful style. With poignant honesty, she offers an accurate close-up of a femininity taking shape and complex, and presents a mature work that ensnares the reader in its bitter and stimulating realism with magical ropes. Shahra Blau's first book, The Creation of the Heart of the Earth, was published in 2007 and received much praise.
