"Becoming Sarah opens with a gut-punch crafted so beautifully, it feels almost divine. Botnick carries the reader through decades and deep inside a world of survivors and strivers, existentialists and cynics, sinners and saints. Full, fresh, and often startlingly funny, this novel offers a new way of looking at the world, and just in time."--Amy Friedman, author of Desperado's Wife

"A prism-like gaze at the jewel of motherhood, with its sharp edges and smooth opaque surfaces, Becoming Sarah keeps churning through several generations of Jewish women, who strive to understand each other and themselves beneath the shadows of the Holocaust. Every sentence is meticulously written and not a word wasted."--Suzzy Roche, founder of The Roches and author of The Town Crazy

"Becoming Sarah is a sweeping generational saga, told in oblique yet powerful prose. From Sarah's birth in Auschwitz through many generations of daughters stretching into the future, Botnick shows us the slowly uncoiling effects of motherlessness, persecution, and displacement--and how love weaves, struggles, and sometimes triumphs through it all."--Helen Benedict, author of The Good Deed and Wolf Season

"Lyrically and meticulously composed . . . Not a traditional Holocaust story, Botnick's narrative examines the effects of the detritus left behind by the great atrocity on those who survived as well as their offspring. . . . Painful, dramatic, and ultimately triumphant."--Kirkus Reviews

How does a survivor of unspeakable acts survive--and what happens to the children they raise? Botnick bravely and successfully takes on these questions with great skill, in a style that is witty and wonderfully hopeful. Becoming Sarah offers a brilliant quartet of unforgettable women who each crave a love that has been stifled but never destroyed."--Gloria Jacobs, former executive director of The Feminist Press and executive editor of Ms. Magazine