Abomination (The Originals)

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As the novel is set in Melbourne’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, there are Hebrew words sprinkled throughout, used in the context of religious life.

But before anything could be done, she was assisted out of the country and found asylum of sorts in Israel, where she was protected by the ultra-Orthodox community there. Loved how protective Scott felt of her and stuck up for her even though he was the new kid at school.The main issue in this book is a little girl named Martha grows up different then many other children and has a hard time making desicions not knowing right or wrong. Yonatan, deeply embedded in the ultra-Orthodox community – he is now a teacher at the school he attended, and married to the rabbi’s daughter – has the furthest to fall. We get some glimpses into that world but the main storyline I found shallow and uninteresting with an ending that was no ending at all. As far as Yonatan’s narrative goes, I don’t want to give too much away but there’s a questioning of faith there, and that questioning is mine—not for the same reasons as Yonatan, of course. On being discharged he worked as a clerk, engineer and printer until 1969 when he entered college to train as a teacher having obtained five 'O' levels at night-school.

It can lead to some excellent debates amongst about the morality of her actions and whether fear is acceptable as a motivation for doing something terrible.

A fascinating contemporary story that offered a glimpse into a world that has always intrigued me, did not disappoint. Goldberg doesn’t rely on shock-value or voyeurism, making this a remarkably deep story about crises of faith and the ripple effects of secrets and scandal. Twenty years later, the lives of the two men are very different: Ezra identifies as secular and atheist, while Yonatan has been ordained as a rabbi and even teaches at the academy. Martha isn't supposed to be friends with him, it's against her father's rules, but starved for some sort of connection she does so and starts breaking the family rules. Martha struggles to fit in at school until she makes one friend who helps her unveil the ‘abomination’.

However, even though I wasn’t the ‘target audience’, I actually really enjoyed this book (perhaps even more than Stone Cold). Some promi­nent mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty are eager to help him, while oth­ers are sick­ened by the secre­cy and cover-up. She dresses plainly, and lives a life without modern distractions like computers or TV (the book was written before smartphones, so they don't figure either).Taunted and bullied at school, and lonely at home with only postcards from her elder sister to keep her sane, Martha knows there has to be some other way of living. It is very realistic and you cannot expect non-adult characters to make adult choices, but it still left me wanting things to be different for them.