David Grossman: Someone to Run With

Tamar, 16 years old and beautiful, has decided to cut off her hair. All of it. Sure, it's a hot summer in Jerusalem, but her reasons run deeper than that. She's assigned herself a desperate mission: infiltrate a network of Israeli street kids and rescue her drug-addled brother. Tamar's haircut is at once an attempt at disguise and an event freighted with darker significance:

"Take it all off," she told the barber, when her turn arrived.
"Everything?" His thin voice curled up at its edges in amazement. "Everything."
The men sitting in the barbershop straightened up. The one called Shimek burst into a choking cough.

Forgive yourself if scenes from Shoah or Holocaust newsreels leap to mind. Tamar knows what she wants, and she usually gets it. Such is the mood in David Grossman's sixth novel, which seems designed to tap a young adult readership. Yet early on, it becomes clear that Someone to Run With will not be the lighthearted romp that its title suggests. Indeed, behind this tale of adolescent adventure there lurks a certain gloom that threatens every promise of happiness.

Assaf, also 16, is an aspiring photographer. He falls in love with Tamar--sight unseen--through her cache of diaries and her wayward dog. Slowly, she begins to take shape in his mind:

He felt now that he had to wait. A familiar feeling was fluttering inside of him: the moment he loved, in the darkroom, when a photo slowly rises out of the solution and the lines start to appear....Another moment or two and he would understand.

Assaf's loneliness finds perfect expression in these pages. He has no real friends; even his family deserted him while they vacationed in the States. As he and the dog run the streets of Jerusalem seeking Tamar, theirs becomes the mutual trust he has craved for so long.

Grossman is an able technician. He parcels out promising clues here and false leads there, never quite showing his hand. The plot unspools in surprising ways: Tamar's search for her brother folds back against Assaf's parallel quest for Tamar. As the time frame shifts repeatedly, the reader weighs the current action against glimpses of a future already revealed.