Son­dra, the nar­ra­tor and main char­ac­ter, lives in a small Kansas town in the 1950’s with very few Jew­ish peo­ple. As she enters junior high, she and her cousin Howie are the only Jews in her class. Son­dra has a spe­cial bond with Howie. Even though Sondra’s reli­gious obser­vance is not very exten­sive, she is upset with Howie when he starts to date non- Jew­ish girls and becomes iden­ti­fied with those who are both pop­u­lar and Chris­t­ian. Sondra’s par­ents rec­og­nize the impor­tance of hav­ing Son­dra meet oth­er Jew­ish teenagers. There­fore, they send her to live with cousins in Kansas City dur­ing the week­ends. While there, Son­dra meets and social­izes with a large group of Jew­ish peers, includ­ing a girl named Deb­bie, who becomes one of her clos­est friends. Deb­bie and Sondra’s Shab­bat expe­ri­ences move Son­dra towards Ortho­doxy. By the time the girls are sopho­mores in col­lege, they go to Jerusalem togeth­er to study. Son­dra becomes engaged to a young man who is also a b’aal tshu­vah while vis­it­ing Jerusalem. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the author writes with a hid­den agen­da. Her writ­ing is nei­ther fresh nor cre­ative, and her dia­logue is wood­en. She repeat­ed­ly gives a biased view of the pos­i­tives of being an obser­vant Jew while crit­i­ciz­ing oth­er ways to live Jew­ish­ly. In one part of the book, she infers that Sondra’s cousin Howie and his Gen­tile girl­friend were killed in a car acci­dent because Howie was dat­ing out­side the faith and was not observ­ing Shab­bat. Her heavy-hand­ed approach and focus on becom­ing ​“frum” detracts from the oth­er mes­sages of the book. Ages 12 and up.