This is a Caldecott award winning children's book, illustrated with robust paper cuts.

What you have to love about this book is that it has a plot in which circumstances and norms put a lovely single mother and her very sweet young son into a situation that they are no more likely to escape than snow is to fall in August. This is a book that is overwhelmingly written in a super realistic style, continuing in Hammill's long hagiography of yesteryear in New York City. The nobel prize winner tells the most famous golem story, that of the Golem of Prague, from the perspective of a gravedigger. A golem never exactly shows up in the story… or does it? Whether it ever appears, whether the story in the book even took place, there is no question that the golem is a symbol that pervades the story. This book endures because it is so grippingly perplexing. The young men in the novel believe they have the original Golem of Prague in a coffin that was also used to spirit one of the main characters out of Nazi occupied Prague. If you have read any book on this list, it's probably this one. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon. If the danger of creation intrigues you, then you might dig these books where men give life to clay. As Chabon puts it, it is not the act of breathing life into the lifeless that makes the story of the golem so interesting, but the element of danger in bringing something to life.

While there are many legends about what makes a golem go, they usually involve a learned practitioner of faith, a lot of chanting, a lump of clay and a word. Michael Chabon wrote that the myth of the golem endures because it mirrors the creative act itself.

Golem by David Wisniewski