“I’m so happy with the cover. I really didn’t want it to be some woman’s sandals in the sand,” says Jessamyn Hope of her new novel Safekeeping, which launches tonight at Book Court in Brooklyn.
Over coffee at Yonah Schimmel, Hope explained that because she’s a female author and her book involves romance, she was concerned it would be labeled “chick lit” — a term that doesn’t begin to encompass the expansive themes in her saga of six characters who meet at a kibbutz in Israel in 1994. The characters —  including an old Zionist Socialist, an Israeli teenager injured in a terrorist attack, and a beautiful Soviet émigré — are all in search of identity and safe harbor from the storm of their personal crises. Interspersed with their stories is the history of a medieval brooch that provides glimpses into turbulent moments in Jewish history.
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