This story by Julie Orringer explores aspects of life and growing up in an American Orthodox Jewish community. Due to her mother’s illness, a teenage Jewish girl raised in a secular environment spends her school holidays living in the Orthodox community of an aunt. Despite community concern that she may be a bad influence on her cousins, she adjusts well to the Orthodox way of life. It is her rebellious, similar-aged cousin, beginning to explore her sexuality, who breaks the community’s strict behavioral rules. Themes include family, protectiveness and distrust, secular vs. Orthodox lifestyles, spiritual awakening, and emerging sexuality. More…