Yocheved ​“Yoyo” Gold is a high school stu­dent in an obser­vant Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty. Her father is a high­ly respect­ed rab­bi, con­sult­ed reg­u­lar­ly about appli­ca­tions of halacha (Jew­ish law) to every­day life. Yoyo is aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly accom­plished and reg­u­lar­ly does com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice while also ful­fill­ing her demand­ing role as a daugh­ter and sib­ling. Yet, she is intel­lec­tu­al­ly and emo­tion­al­ly unable to defer to author­i­ty as a default con­di­tion for accep­tance. When her clos­est friend, Esti, open­ly defies Ortho­dox norms and trans­fers to a dis­tant board­ing school, Yoyo finds her­self ques­tion­ing the foun­da­tions of her beliefs and prac­tices. Isaac Blum’s nov­el for young adults con­tex­tu­al­izes Yoyo’s explo­ration of per­son­al auton­o­my with­in the restric­tive frame­work of tra­di­tion­al Judaism. Yoyo also reach­es her own con­clu­sions about the con­se­quences of choic­es that are dis­con­nect­ed from values.

Blum takes risks in address­ing Ortho­dox laws that may appear inde­fen­si­ble to some read­ers. He suc­ceeds in describ­ing com­plex­i­ty, rather than pas­sive accep­tance, in his pre­sen­ta­tion of these issues. Yoyo’s halacha class is focus­ing on the rea­sons behind rul­ings on kol isha, which pro­hibits men from lis­ten­ing to a woman’s singing voice, as well as issues relat­ing to negiah and yichud. The lat­ter two con­cepts restrict any phys­i­cal con­tact between unre­lat­ed men and women, and the shar­ing of phys­i­cal space that might encour­age vio­la­tion of those lim­its. Stu­dious Yoyo can imme­di­ate­ly come up with the max­i­mum amount of time that a man and woman may share an ele­va­tor: three min­utes. Yoyo does not ver­bal­ize her qual­i­fi­er, but thinks to her­self, ​“That was the gen­er­al­ly accept­ed num­ber, though, of course, it was some­what arbi­trary.” As the nar­ra­tive devel­ops, she finds her­self con­stant­ly eval­u­at­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties of dif­fer­ent opin­ions, a process that actu­al­ly defines the study of Torah. Accord­ing to her father, the lim­its are unmis­tak­able, but Yoyo sees more ambi­gu­i­ty than cer­tain­ty. Even­tu­al­ly, she even uses social media to chal­lenge the injus­tices she can no longer tolerate.

The rel­a­tive rapid­i­ty of Yoyo’s trans­for­ma­tion from duti­ful daugh­ter to rebel­lious young adult may seem sur­pris­ing, but Blum traces a num­ber of events that cat­alyze the change. Esti had been her con­fi­dante, but also rep­re­sent­ed the via­bil­i­ty of a dif­fer­ent path. When Yoyo meets Mick­ey, a new par­tic­i­pant in her com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice project, who is Jew­ish but decid­ed­ly not Ortho­dox, their devel­op­ing friend­ship can­not offer the same mutu­al sup­port. Mick­ey enjoys appar­ent­ly unlim­it­ed free­dom to dress as she choos­es, have access to an unfil­tered phone, and ignore the sex­ist stan­dards that blame women for men’s behav­ior. Her impulse-dri­ven deci­sions offer an alter­na­tive to the prin­ci­pled resis­tance that Yoyo has undertaken.

Accord­ing to Jew­ish tra­di­tion, each per­son is des­tined to find his or her bash­ert, or life part­ner. While Yoyo has been taught that par­ents and com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers will deter­mine who ful­fills that role for each young per­son, her heart tells her oth­er­wise. Her intense attrac­tion to Shua, a young man who is equal­ly ambiva­lent about com­pli­ance with expec­ta­tions, forms the roman­tic core of the nov­el. Find­ing some­one who both rejects and inhab­its the pre­cepts that will define her iden­ti­ty, Yoyo Gold begins to dis­cov­er who she real­ly is.