Disobedience
Ratings19
Average rating3.3
By the age of 32, Ronit has left London and transformed her life. She has become a cigarette-smoking, wise-cracking, New York career woman, who is in love with a married man.But when Ronit's father dies she is called back into the very different world of her childhood, a world she thought she had left far behind. The orthodox Jewish suburb of Hendon, north London is outraged by Ronit and her provocative ways. But Ronit is shocked too by the confrontation with her past. And when she meets up with her childhood girlfriend Esti, she is forced to think again about what she has left behind.
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Deducting a star for using dream sequences, which I loathe in any story. Other than that it was a fantastic book.
First off, as a Jew, I will say it was really off-putting to have Ronit (as an offshoot of the author's own assumptions of all Jews I imagine) bring in the whole “only self-hating Jews aren't pro-Israel” bit. But I get it, this is a book for gentiles, so fine.
What really bothered me was that I came in expecting a forbidden childhood-to-lesbian lovers romance and did NOT get ANYTHING like that. There wasn't even an affair; beyond kissing some, Ronit and Esti immediately stopped trying and Esti snapped out of her lifelong love for Ronit after one rejection. It was very...shallow? Though none of the characters really had a strong enough voice for me to notice much depth to them beyond the narrative bashing me in the head with how aggressive Ronit was. The focus on Dovid was also odd in a story that wasn't supposed to be about him, and it took a lot away from the main characters, Esti especially, who already was as easy to miss in the book as she apparently was when she eavesdropped. It seemed like what the book really wanted to be about was Ronit's/Naomi's realization that she could be Jewish without being a practicing Orthodox Jew, and that her upbringing would always have an influence on her, and that's FINE and all, but it certainly doesn't come across as romantic lol. Especially when the most important relationship Ronit has in this novel is not to Esti at all, but to her deceased father; that is the man she's dreaming about, in the end.
It was also kind of a slog to get through; as much as I love reading Jewish lore and Torah stories, having two or more pages of exposition at the beginning of each chapter dragged the story down a lot, especially when you already had prayer quotes. These could have been integrated much better in the thoughts of the narrators during the story itself, I think.
Overall, I guess I enjoyed parts of it? The descriptions of Dovid's migraines were pretty interesting, and I enjoyed that Esti and Ronit clung to David and Johnathon's story in the Torah.
