I loved it. By the end of the novel, I was emotionally exhausted but also deeply appreciative of the care and nuance on every page, the characters’ messiness and the plot’s purposeful irresolution ... There are off-key moments that will likely elude most readers: There isn’t a lone tattoo artist in Jerusalem but tattoo shops aplenty; one transliteration collapses two different phrases into one; and the weight placed on whiteness rings false in a place where colorism certainly exists, but ethnicity, religion and nationality are far more meaningful than American connotations of race. For the most part, however, Sacks skillfully balances her characters’ daily dramas and relationships — crushes, parents, siblings, engagements, babies and sex — with the ever-present hum of underlying ideology and potential violence.

... lovely ... The panoramic ambition, scope and complexity of City of a Thousand Gates is embodied in its Cast of Characters – 32 in all, in nine distinct groupings. The third-person narration offers a mosaic of perspectives, shifting fluidly, but without much change in voice or style, from character to character ... The novel’s juxtapositions and coincidences surprise without shocking. Sacks writes with a generosity and gentleness at odds with her troubling subject matter ... Sacks writes explicit sex scenes, celebrating compatibility, experimentation and, more ambivalently, the excitement inherent in power imbalances and self-abandon ... Despite its profusion of characters, City of a Thousand Gates is too gracefully written to grow sluggish. A tighter focus might arguably have made for an even better book – perhaps a deeper character study, a more propulsive plot. But Sacks’ craft, especially her mastery of language and pacing, is impressive. Having lived in Tel Aviv and reported from both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, she seems to have captured the authentic texture of these metropolises, and of the clashing cultures she depicts ... hardly a conventional thriller. Nor is its patient humanism — its compassion for the many flawed people who inhabit its contested landscape – startlingly original or transgressive. What is thrilling is to see how cleverly Sacks fits the puzzle pieces of her narrative together, linking all those lives with far fewer than six degrees of separation between them.

Vast in scope, Sacks’ stunning first novel takes place in the contemporary West Bank and follows a large cast of characters to explore the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ... Sacks imbues her first novel with foreboding at every turn...And yet, through her vibrant characters, she paints a moving and powerful portrait of those who love the region passionately despite its many tensions and dangers.

Such a large and various cast reflects the scope of a book whose project seems nothing short of dramatizing one of the world’s most unyielding conflicts in a way that shows all sides and takes none ... Sacks is an extraordinarily gifted writer whose intelligence, compassion and skill on both the sentence and tension level rise to meet her ambition. She keeps us constantly on edge, unaware of who the story will go to and what event might happen next. In this environment of fear, everyone’s senses are heightened ... might not appeal to readers who like their stories neatly unified, resolved, centered on the individual. It’s an imperfect book, unbothered by a few loose ends. But it makes a convincing case for a literature of multiplicity, polyphonic and clamorous, abuzz with challenges and contradictions, with no clear answers but a promise to stay alert to the world, in all its peril and vitality.

Through the eyes of these and many more compelling characters, Sacks creates a snapshot of lives shattered by decades of conflict ... This ambitious, forceful debut novel, likely informed by Sacks’s years studying in Tel Aviv, personalizes with startling clarity the seemingly unsolvable conundrum that is the Middle East. This is a thinking reader’s book.

In City of a Thousand Gates, Rebecca Sacks’s ambitious first novel, the lives of a sprawling cast of characters intersect in the West Bank, where 'ideology is unfolding in violent, consequential ways.' ... The novel digs into the enduring wound of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and offers an unflinching, unforgiving look into the harsh realities of the occupation and its impact on people’s lives ... the author’s description of the deep-seated hatred on both sides reads devastatingly true ... Sacks, an American who lived in Israel for a couple of years, demonstrates a knowledge of the region, but her characters’ actions aren’t always persuasive ... the book is peppered with well-built cliffhangers that remain unresolved ... Though these narrative uncertainties evoke the unsettling pervasiveness of menace underpinning everyday life in the region, the effect is often frustrating. But in a novel that resists offering a false sense of hope in the face of conflict, the open ends seem only fitting.

... ambitious and panoramic ... Sacks demonstrates a deep knowledge of the place and its people, and does an excellent job of inhabiting the many points of view through strong voices and rich emotion, making palpable the hate and love at odds not only across cultures but within individual hearts. Fans of Nathan Englander will find much to love.