Like No Other by Una LaMarche (review)

On a stormy night in a Brooklyn hospital, sweet, nerdy Jaxon and pious Devorah get stuck in an elevator during a power outage. Jaxon is eager to be the hero who saves the day, while Devorah is fearful of breaking the prohibition of her Hasidic faith regarding being alone with an unrelated male, let alone a handsome black guy her own age. Jaxon’s gentleness wins her over, however, and soon she finds herself chafing against her frum ways and contriving ways to see Jaxon again. Her strict brother-in-law is suspicious, and when she tries to run away with Jaxon, he enlists the local Shomrim to give Jaxon a beat-down and convinces Devorah’s parents that she needs to be sent to a facility where wayward Hasidic girls are rehabilitated back into the faith. While the crush between Jaxon and Devorah has the heady, irrational intensity of first infatuation, the book wisely recognizes it as an opportunity for both of them to break from their old personas and figure out who they want to be as young adults. Devorah’s bonds are far more confining than Jaxon’s, but in confronting them Jaxon gains the assertiveness he has heretofore lacked, and he is rewarded in multiple ways on his home turf. Devorah, for her part, is able to cast a critical eye on her future and figure out what’s possible for her within her faith tradition. Readers will likely move through the story on Jaxon’s side, given the authentic, personable energy of his narrative voice and his experience of Devorah’s culture as an outsider, but Devorah’s narration is eye-opening, especially for young women who have always taken the rules, spoken and unspoken, of their communities for granted. The fact that both Jaxon and Devorah both get their happy endings even though they don’t end up together makes the book all the more effective for not glossing over the very real difficulties of religious and cultural differences in contemporary multicultural society.