aprilmay's Full Review: Pearl Abraham - The Romance Reader: A Novel
The Romance Reader
by Pearl Abraham
Paperback, 304pp.
Berkley Publishing Group, September 1996
$13.00
In The Romance Reader, Pearl Abraham provides her readers with an insider's view of a community few have viewed even from the outside. The young protagonist, Rachel, is a teenage girl growing up in an orthodox Chassidic family. Her father is a rabbi and a dreamer, her mother is a stressed-out complainer. Rachel herself is a little of both, and dreams of life outside the strict confines and requirements of her ultra-conservative environment. I don't mean to suggest that Rachel's parents are simple characters. Both are complex and brilliantly imagined by Abraham. In fact, it is Abraham's gift for creating characters that makes this such a wonderful novel. But it is Rachel, independent and full of spirit, who pulls readers in and keeps them engaged through the trials and tribulations of her teenage adolescence.
It has been assumed from Rachel's birth that she will marry by the age of eighteen, and fulfill a woman's most important (and seemingly only) roles of wife and mother. But Rachel has been reading forbidden novels, everything from Huckleberry Fin, which she steals from a local store, to romances, to mysteries. But romances are her favorites, and through them she imagines another world for herself--the outside world of see-through panty-hose and bathing suits, two of the items forbidden to Chassidic women (although Rachel does win the bathing suit argument when she saves a young boy as a lifeguard).
In the battle of wills between Rachel and her family, more than personal happiness is at stake. Her entire family will be shamed if Rachel conduct herself according to their rules of propriety. As Rachel tells her own first-person narrative, Abraham exquisitely weaves the language and customs of Chassidic culture into the book. The reader becomes swept along on a journey into an orthodox community in 1970's New York. Rachel's ups and downs, successes and failures culminate in a pending arranged marriage that brings to the forefront the conflict between Rachel's intense desire for independence and her love for and attachment to her family.
The Romance Reader is well-written, easy to read, and relatively fast paces. But Abraham does not offer easy solutions for any of the characters. Raised in a Chassidic family herself, she is familiar with the struggles and turmoil that accompany planned or actual breaks with tradition. Although she denies the book is autobiographical, her own intimate connection to the Chassidic community has certainly contributed to her insightful and sensitive novel.
In one of the most exciting debuts in years, Pearl Abraham--who grew up in a Hasidic community herself--presents the story of Rachel, a girl caught be...More at Alibris
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