By Rebecca Sacks
Harper: 400 pages, $8.
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I was nearly certain, before I started reading “City of a Thousand Gates,” the debut novel
by Rebecca Sacks, that I was going to hate it. The way it was being pitched reminded me of the early breathlessness around “American Dirt,” a novel that was marketed as the definitive take on the Mexico-to-U.S. immigration experience. Promotional materials promising “Gates” would “spark admiration and controversy” immediately put me on edge; learning the author had spent only a couple years in Israel and the West Bank, the politically fraught setting of the book, made me even warier.