"My Basmati Bat Mitzvah" and "Mira in the Present Tense" I grew up in a Russian-Jewish-Cuban-Scotch-Irish-German home. At the time, my ethnicity list was a personal torment. I'd ask my parents if we could please be French. Or Italian. Anything, as long as it was just one thing. Being a "half" - or, in my case, a handful - can still be complicated, as Paula J. Freedman makes plain in "My Basmati Bat Mitzvah," her candy-colored first novel about a New York "Hin-Jew," meaning, in this case, a girl whose mother is Hindu and whose father is Jewish. At 12, Tara Feinstein lives casually in both cultures. She sprinkles chaat masala on popcorn and loves matzo ball soup. A small statue of Ganesh, the Hindu god, sits on her dresser, and she actually enjoys Hebrew school - or at least she did. Now she has to plan her bat mitzvah, and she isn't sure she wants one. "Why was I doing this?" she asks. Her mother, a convert, admires Judaism from afar. Her father has not been to temple in "twelve hundred years." Her Gran is observant, but who knows what she really believes. Then there's Ben-o, her lifelong pal and possible boyfriend. He's a Catholic; would a bat mitzvah pry them apart? There's a trickier problem, the same one Judy Blume explored in her 1970 classic "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. Tara isn't sure whether she believes in God. And she can't discuss that with her parents. They've booked the hall. She tells her best friend, Rebecca, who changes the subject. Ben-o says she might go to hell. Imitating a Bollywood star, she covers her face, wailing, "Nahee!" It's an enemy, Sheila Rosenberg, who finally helps her make a decision. "I'm surprised you're having one, Tara," she says. You're not even Jewish. Technically. She's having one. But she's not inviting Sheila. From there, the novel moves swiftly toward what Vijay, her faux-gangsta cousin, calls the "bazmatzah thing." And despite an inventive collection of crises (such as accidentally burning a treasured sari), she ends up exactly where she needs to be. True, Freedman makes a few wrong turns along the way. A section on Tara's Robotics Club goes nowhere. There's too much Sheila, and not enough Ben-o. And some characters are cardboard cutouts. Gran, who must be only in her 60s, sounds like an Old World bubbe on an ancient ­sitcom. None of this really detracts from Tara's quest to determine, finally, just who she is. "If everything was open to discussion," she concludes, "then just maybe there were no wrong answers" - nothing to stop her from being an ordinary Jewish girl with "a sprinkling of masala on top." "Mira in the Present Tense" (published in England as "Artichoke Hearts"), by Sita Brahmachari, is a lyrical, more serious novel about another "Hin-Jew," this one British and focused less on "the Indian Jewish thing" than on the awfulness of turning 12. Mira Levenson's family has gathered for her birthday at the home of her grandmother, Nana Josie, a bohemian artist who quotes Frida Kahlo. They all know Nana Josie is very ill, but they don't know she's ordered a coffin until it arrives unexpectedly at Mira's party. Stunned, standing between a pink cake and a casket, Mira gets her first period. Things get even weirder when Nana asks her to help paint a landscape on the coffin. Like Tara, Mira has an overinvolved Jewish father and a loving if distracted Indian mother. And like Tara, Mira isn't sure what she believes, addressing questions to a power she calls "Notsurewho Notsurewhat." Turning 12 has made her anxious: "It feels like I'm walking a tightrope," she says. Something is happening to me right now. Present tense. Tara may have cured her "multiple ethnicity disorder" but Mira's problem is more diffuse. She must learn to live inside that present tense, overcoming her shyness and her fear of engaging with others - even the dying. As Nana says, most people grow "tough little shells around their hearts," like "the outside layers of an artichoke." Mira, she hopes, will stay open and strong but still tender, like an artichoke as "you come closer to the heart." Betsy Israel is the author of the teenage memoir "Grown-Up Fast" and "Bachelor Girl," a cultural history of single women. "The Mythology Project," her first young adult novel, comes out next year.