I may be the last person to know about this BUT, I just learned my library offers e-books for check out.  I’ll admit that I really love reading on my iPad.  Much more than I ever expected to, and that’s how I’ve been doing most of my reading for a couple of years now.  So you can imagine my interest in learning this was a possibility.  You do end up in a queue for the more popular titles but it’s fun to look through all the options.  It was just around Christmas that I needed something to read.  I decided to sort the e-books by ‘available now’ and scanned page after page for a title and cover that piqued my interest.  Sometimes I shop for stories like wine so these two details are very important to this consumer.

One title quickly popped out at me, I Am Forbidden.  Hmmm.  It didn’t have a shirtless man and shoulder baring woman with long flowing hair on the cover so it seemed safe to investigate.  The book was written by Anouk Markovits and her bio probably caught my attention more than the summary paragraph.  This is her second book, but first in English.  She left her family at 19 because of an arranged marriage being forced on her and proceeded to get a master’s degree in architecture and a Ph.D. in romance studies.  She was raised in a Hasidic Jewish family in France.  Being Jewish, let alone orthodox, being raised in France and being so academically decorated are all foreign to me and mysterious enough to make me believe I should look into the story.  After all, it was the right price!

It took about 50 pages for me to fall into her literary rhythm but she had me with the first sentence.  “I am forbidden, so are my children and my children’s children, forbidden for ten generations male or female.”  Now that’s a serious position to be in.  The story runs from the end of WWII to 2012.  Her characters are so beautifully flawed you sink into their world and feel their experiences.  The people you want to hate or blame are not bad people.  Their intent is never bad, they just think differently.  When I finished the book I thought of The House of Sand And Fog by Andre Dubus III.  It didn’t flow quite as easily but I have no doubt Ms. Markovits can get there.  She opened up an otherwise unknown world to me.  These men with black hats, robes and curls.  Their wives, children, and what makes them so devout was truly interesting to me.

I will freely admit that I downloaded a couple of other books I knew nothing about and deleted them within pages but am so happy to be on the front end of what I believe will be a book that’s reputation continues to grow slowly and deliberately by word of mouth.

So Is It A Good Story?  Oh yes.  Very very good.  I recommend it to anyone.  I would also highly recommend it as a book club choice.  It may not be the best book for the person in our life that reads only a couple of books per year but for those of us who read a page or two every day….. oh yes!