I adored this book. What was supposed to be a quick 30 minutes of reading before my day carried on turned into an absolutely lost day. I could not put this book down.

Isabelle Lira is a very rich Jewish woman living in Victorian London. She has inherited her father’s portion of a surety business, but her business partners are putting pressure on her to marry, preferably one of them. Isabelle is young, still grieving, but absolutely determined to be the empress of surety, as she calls herself. So she sets up three festivals at her family home with the express purpose of looking for a husband. She invites both the Jewish and gentile communities to these fetes and it’s a chance for her to shine and strengthen existing business contacts too.

There’s one problem: the law at the time isn’t exactly favourable to women and Lira needs some personal insurance. Specifically, she needs leverage that she can use against her future husband to ensure that she maintains power over her family business which would technically be owned by her husband. Perhaps a secret that she could threaten to reveal (without damaging herself or the community). To find this information, she recruits the custodian of the Great Synagogue, a community she has only recently joined following the union of the Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities.

Aaron Ellenberg works as the custodian now but he has five failed apprenticeships behind him. In his eyes and in the eyes of the community (according to Aaron), all he’s good for is cleaning up spills. When Isabelle presents him with a massive financial incentive to do her bidding, he takes it. This could be his chance to be independent and thus have a family of his own. He would no longer need to rely on the community for his upkeep.

This is a gender-swapped Cinderella retelling in so far as elements of the various versions of Cinderella are intertwined into the story. This is no retelling of the famous Disney film. Personally, I think it’s richer for it, because it allows the story to follow its own logic rather than the set plot of the fairy tale. It is also absolutely glorious for me that it is Isabelle who has the traditionally masculine virtues of ambition, drive and power. Aaron literally feeds the wild animals that live near him. Primarily, he brings kindness to the table. I find their dynamic delightful.

One of my favourite parts of the book are the conversations they have in Aaron’s room at the synagogue. Yes, there is growing, delicious chemistry between them, but more importantly, in a society in which the appearance of respectability is essential for survival, these conversations are outside of that world, completely free of artifice or any kind of ‘appearance management’. For these two, this outlet, these conversations, are some of the only completely transparent and open interactions they have outside of very close loved ones. Aaron sometimes tries to put on a brusque face, but it never has any staying power. They see each other too clearly for that.

Their honesty and openness are gifts for the reader. While their relationship unfolds over chapter-long conversations, here are two brief extracts to give you a taste. Keep in mind these are from their second conversation ever:

He opened his mouth to speak, but she held up a finger to shush him, nearly grazing his lips.

Oy.

In his own home.

…

“I wasn’t finished.”

“You’ve been relegated to menial labour, but you have other skills that can be far more useful in the right hands.”

“And those hands would be yours?” His muscles tensed, the air between him and her heating. Why had he even tried to play the villain against this woman?

Aside from teaching at a Jewish school for a couple years, my exposure to Jewish cultures and history is limited. So there might well be things that I’m missing or not fully appreciating. That being said, this book gave me a new appreciation of the fears of expulsion that generations of Jewish people faced and the ways in which playing into the ‘respectability’ of the gentiles was essential to Jewish survival (acceptance was too great a hope). It also reminded me of the power, importance and sometimes challenge of being a close-knit community that relied on itself for survival and protection.

There are Yiddish phrases and words in the book, but there are enough context clues that this book remains easily accessible to anyone regardless of their familiarity with the language. The holidays mentioned in the book serve more as markers of deadlines and intricate knowledge of Jewish holidays is not required to enjoy this book. All this being said, there’s a brilliant note at the end by the author giving more insight into the history of Jewish people in Britain in the 1830s.

Something I really loved about this book was that I was completely immersed in a worldview different to my own, one which I’m not that familiar with. This is not merely historical romance with Jewish protagonists. This book has Jewish protagonists in a Jewish story set in a Jewish community, with all the swoonworthy moments and elation-inducing HEA found in good historical romances.

There are a few things that made this book unputdownable. There are the conversations between Isabelle and Aaron that I mentioned earlier, there is the richly drawn Jewish community of which they are part (secondary characters can so often be plot bunnies, but not this time!). It also felt so good reading a book that built the emotional closeness of Isabelle and Aaron so effortlessly until they confess their feelings for each other in a suitably dramatic way.

I have my eye on some of the secondary characters, hoping that their turn will come as this seems to be the first in a series. If you need a truly immersive story that will keep you rapt from the word go, then this is the book for you. I loved this story, and I cannot wait for news of book two.