The Singer Sisters by Sarah Seltzer (Flatiron Books)

The world of contemporary music, performed in venues ranging from 1960s folk rock clubs to 1990s alternative rock (alt-rock) stadium concerts, presents a captivating new milieu for Jewish fiction. The Singer Sisters by Sarah Seltzer intertwines tales of the music industry with themes of sisterhood, motherhood and marriage, all seen through a Jewish lens.

Seltzer, an award-winning journalist, brings her experience and distinctive feminist voice as executive editor of Lilith—a magazine with the tag line “independent, Jewish & frankly feminist”—to both the Jewish and female aspects of her debut novel.

The titular sisters are Judie and Sylvia Zingerman, 1960s teens who sing duets in their Massachusetts synagogue. After their musical parents invite aspiring musician Dave Cantor, stage name Dave Canticle, to their Shabbat table, Judie abandons her plans for college to join Dave in New York City’s Greenwich Village in search of fame as a singer-songwriter à la Bob Dylan. However, her career doesn’t take off until she moves back home to start recording with her sister.

The book meanders through time and perspectives as the three rise to stardom. The success of The Singer Sisters—the name of their popular duo—is largely based on Judie’s skills as a songwriter, writing hits that hint at, but don’t reveal, the depths of her private life, while Dave makes a name as a solo artist. Dave and Judie marry and are labeled “folk-rock royalty” and “one of music’s ‘most enduring’ couples.” But we already know that this is no happily ever after. On page one of Seltzer’s novel, the two inform their grown children that they are going to split up.

Seltzer dives most deeply into the mind of Emma Cantor, Judie and Dave’s alt rock-loving daughter. After she was born, Judie shocked her fans (and her sister) by giving up singing for motherhood. As a young adult in the 1990s, Emma decides to skip college to write and perform her own songs, echoing the fame of her mom and dad. After her debut single, Seltzer writes, Emma becomes “an It Girl. Parties and ceremony invites piled up.” Yet Judie fears that Emma will repeat her mistakes. But what mistakes?

Enter the mysterious Rose, who worked as Emma’s au pair one long-ago summer. When Rose attends one of Emma’s concerts and meets up with her afterward, Emma recalls an angry moment from that summer, when Rose had called the Cantors “a family of liars.”

Much of the book is spent untangling the family’s secrets and lies, as Emma asks questions, scours her memory, writes her own soul-searching songs and uncovers a stash of her mother’s never-recorded pieces.

The relationship between Emma and Judie is the heart of this novel. Both women have regrets. Both wonder if motherhood and stardom can coexist. Dave and other men can have it all—music, fame, family—but can a woman?

Seltzer’s characters carry their Jewishness lightly, casually mentioning Holocaust-survivor ancestors or briefly hesitating before eating treyf food. But the Jewish theme of teshuvah, repentance, weighs heavily on their stories, leading to admissions and apologies and new beginnings.

Opportunity beckons—for mother-daughter reconciliation, perhaps, and for Judie to forgive herself and allow her beloved music back into her life.

Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer, poet and book reviewer living in Connecticut.