Rachel Benjamin is determined to wear sheer stockings, become a lifeguard, join a public library and read herself silly on the works of Barbara Cart land, Victoria Holt et al. Mild enough aspirations, you might think, for a teenager in America: but Rachel is the eldest daughter of a Hasidic rabbi, and as far as her family is concerned such behaviour is only slightly less scandalous than serial murder, multiple divorce or missing synagogue on Shabbot. In her debut novel Pearl Abrahams brings us straight to the centre of a society which is almost unimaginable to the outsider, and makes of her heroine's adolescent agonies not. one gathers, unrelated to her own a metaphor for all our ineffectual flutterings at freedom.
