This was a page turner, an intensely gripping read. I happened upon the book in the bookstore and I ended up having to buy it because I could not leave the store without it [at a time when I did not have much disposable income).

It centers on the orthodox wife of a Jewish rabbi, and the choices she finds herself making after she is raped by a black man and then finds herself pregnant and doesn't know who the father is. It also contrasts the choices she made with the choices of her girlhood friends.

2019: I think that the author chose the rapist to be black so that it would be obvious when the baby was born whether or not the baby was the child of the rabbi. But current day me flinches.

I really wanted to like this book - knowing Ragen to be a well-respected author and amateur sociologist when it comes to the Orthodox Jewish community - but I didn't. It is about a woman named Tamar who is married to a well-respected scholar in her isolated ultra-Orthodox community. Tamar is raped early in the book, and the results of that incident follow her through her life and that of her family.

What I did like about the book was that her two best friends represented two alternative approaches to Judaism within the Orthodox community. Still, I found the character development weak, the plot predictable, and the community in many ways reduced to the archetypes and stereotypes already familiar to me. The writing was easy to follow, but not good enough to make up for the other shortcomings.