Nancy Green is brought up in a secularized Jewish home during the 1960s. Her world feels small and she often longs for something grand but is afraid to pursue it. Throughout the story, the focus is on her three loves; that of a Jew from Hasidic background who decided to become a monk; a tempestuous relationship between her and Yvon who is caught at a crossroads between his own desires and that of his mother's; and then of Nancy and a man who would briefly be her husband. Unfortunately, the marriage is not to be, and while trying to heal from wounds, memories of Yvon begin to pursue Nancy and she begins to seek him, only to realize that time is fleeting and waits for no one. Will Nancy be able to defeat the time, or will she become its victim?

On the surface, AMERICAN STRANGER by David Plante appears to be a simple story of a young Jewish woman seeking love, but going deeper, AMERICAN STRANGER is anything but simple. It's a story to analyze and go over and over in trying to understand what the author has meant or was talking about. It's also a story of extremes between various cultures as well as groups, and what happens when it comes to extreme manifestations of either being too open for the world at the loss of cultural identity versus being too shunned off from the world with little to no knowledge of the world.

The title itself is a double play on how I imagine Nancy Greene and Yvon feel in America, as strangers as well as how Nancy feels when she briefly lives in England and tries her best to become part of her husband's couple. Compared with Nancy's friends and her choice of partners, she literally feels lost because Americans weren't really featured in the book, but instead ethnic minorities were.

AMERICAN STRANGER is really not a story to rush through, and it invites the reader to think and wonder about identity, along with Nancy's romantic path in terms of her partner. It's a story of a strange silence, how little events penetrate the ultimate decisions that characters make about themselves. They are seen and felt, but on a larger scale are like drops in the ocean.

If you are looking for a story that engages the mind using American identity and something more cerebral, but at the same time asks you to understand a different mind, AMERICAN STRANGER does dare answer that call and more.