At the age of 16, she is emotionally shut down, living alone and ruthlessly discouraging anyone who might offer her friendship or affection. The sole exception is her abiding love for her cat, Tule—a cat who, coincidentally, is trying to teach Lea to get through life without killing anyone else.

Then Jack the Yid—a small-time dope dealer who happens to be a regular at Lea's restaurant—is violently attacked by a couple of gangsters. Lea intervenes, with typically lethal results, and the pair form a peculiar friendship. Jack claims to be building a spaceship in a walled-off area of a nearby Sears and Roebuck store. He believes that when the spaceship is perfected it will link up with the Meschiach, a ship in a parallel universe, and take him and 14 other Chosen Ones to the promised land of Ish-ra-el.

Lea helps with the spaceship, varnishing its floor and layering gold foil onto its ceiling, and over time she finds her emotional armor weakening. As she falls in love with Jack, though, people begin to notice her and—worse—become aware of her Talent. Soon the local mobsters are hatching schemes to force Lea to use her deadly ability for profit ... and Jack is part of their plans. Is he really the sweet lunatic he appears to be, or is he just using her, too?

A dark and edgy love story

Eliot Fintushel's fiction is strange and beautiful stuff, and readers familiar with mind-bending short stories like "White Man's Trick" and "Santacide" will be unsurprised to learn that this author's first novel has all of the lyrical power and insane genius of his earlier work. Lea's story is the foundation of a dazzling, fanciful latticework of Jewish prophecy, mob hijinks, unlikely romance and even the occasional plague of rats.

Despite these layers of complexity, the book's plot is deceptively simple: Jack's quest builds to a showstopping confrontation between the forces of good and evil, while Lea learns how to reach out to the people she has held at arm's length for so long. The noise and fury of the race to perfect the spaceship and the novel's cast of bizarre characters take second stage to the growth of Lea's passions: her longing for love and her attempts to come to grips with the pain of the past. She is a compelling heroine, lovable but never cuddly, her pain all too believable.

This is not to say that Jack's quest—and the attempts of everyone from mobsters to the devil to stop him—is mere window dressing. The spaceship and the coming of the Meschiach matter deeply, tied as they are to all Lea's newborn hopes and dreams. Breakfast With the Ones You Love is one of those books whose outcome is rarely in doubt, yet somehow Fintushel brings his story to its inevitable conclusion in a way that is surprising—heartbreakingly so—while still leaving room for hope and a measure of joy.