Content warnings: Death of a parent (prior to the book starting) and fears of/managing threats of anti-Semitism and related expulsion
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.
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I’m so pleased that my library has this. I think it’s the first book of Felicia Grossman’s they do have – and in paper as well as ebook. I’m really looking forward to reading this.
Looking forward to this one!
Sold! There are so few historicals with Jewish characters.
This looks amazing! Thank you for the review.
Thanks for your review, Lara. This does sound great!
I’ve seen some truly mixed reviews for this one; I adore FG so I’m excited to see how it works for me!
I’m interested! I’ll be adding this to my library list. 🙂
I really wanted to be impressed by this book after this glowing review. I liked the premise, but to me at least, it is only moderately successful in executing said premise. It’s not easy to pin down why it seems mediocre to me, but let me try.
First, the writing in full generality, both prose and dialogue, seems somewhat stilted and florid, and that’s before we get to any sex scenes. Narrative descriptions seem to take more words than they should, and the people don’t sound like people, but like characters in a fairytale or, well, bodice-ripper? Or rather what I imagine bodice-ripper characters to sound like, having had more experience with parodies than the real thing. Maybe I should have expected this from my historical romance fairytale adaptation, but the characters acting and sounding too much removed from “real” people keeps me from really getting immersed.
Second, while Isabelle is a total delight, I feel like Aaron is not able match her chops as a main character. Where Isabelle is beautiful, smart as a whip, driven and ambitious and even trained in the use of multiple weapon types (that last one was a surprise to me for sure when it was established!), Aaron’s positive qualities are mainly having a good heart and not being a complete moron?
He thinks of himself as a charity case, and it’s unfortunate that this seems somewhat true? He is not especially well-suited for the intrigue activities that Isabelle hires him for, as he seems unable to lie or dissemble even to obvious enemies. He tries and fails and this makes him seem wishy-washy and ineffectual, where not even trying and firmly refusing to go along with attempts to pressure or intimidate him could have showcased his integrity. It would have been good if Aaron had a few extra areas of exceptional competence to match Isabelle that come in useful during the plot of this book, and that had been overlooked by his detractors up to this point.
Third, the level of intrigue in general does not meet my expectations, which is not great, since that’s the central plot of this book. These two come across as children playing at subterfuge while in actuality having little idea of what they are doing. If they end up outmaneuvering the opposition arrayed against them, it seems like that is due more to luck than cleverness, which does not seem ideal to me.
Finally, the romance progression seems hinky as well. In this kind of historical romance setting I expect a little more in the way of initial reluctance than we actually get here. Isabelle is an utter naïf in the physical aspects of romance, which on one hand seems like a decent way for her character to be flawed, but on the other hand she is a wealthy heiress who I fully expect to have had the dangers of the temptations of the flesh drummed into her since adolescence.
She is definitely close enough to her grandmother to have had some frank talks on the subject somewhere in her past, but Isabelle does not even seem to be aware that it is possible for her to get carried away. Given her central goal and how much she is otherwise aware of the importance of maintaining the appearance of respectability in order to reach said goal, how easily she discards propriety with Aaron clashes significantly with her established character. The progression from “this person is super attractive to me, but I mustn’t” to “we are now inappropriately touching each other” seems to happen more because this is a romance novel and that’s what’s supposed to happen rather than in a way that makes sense with these specific characters and situations.
All in all, while I don’t have any big specific complaints about the plot or characterization, there are just too many ways in which this book does not sell its premise well enough for me to be completely happy with it, which leaves me feeling like I’m sort of wasting my time here.
@Quizer, I think you used a whole lot of words to say that Aaron is a schlemiel? That was my take as well.
It seems that in this setting, the rules of conduct within the Jewish community are more relaxed. Our two main characters having a dalliance before she marries someone else seems to matter only insofar as the outside world will care if it gets out. I have no idea if this is historically accurate, but it seems odd, to say the least.