The internet didn't invent the cultural bubbles which surround each of us. I'm talking about those worldviews which only allow in what we want to see and filter out all the rest. Google famously structures our searches in this insular way.

What the internet did was automate insulation and intensify it and make it more obviously problematic. It made the world smaller which meant both more clashes with those who are different from us, and it made us huddle more tightly together to fight that difference. And it made us more aware of the bubble phenomenon. That's where we find ourselves today, living in a world that not only has alternative points of view but alternative facts.

This mistitled book tells the story of a particularly exotic bubble--that of the Satmars. I'm assuming you're not a Satmar because, if you were, what are you doing on the forbidden internet?
I picked up this book after seeing the Netflix documentary "One of Us" which is about the lives of 3 Hasids attempting to break away from their community. It is told from the standpoint of those looking to escape. There's little to like about the Hasidic culture that is making their lives miserable. I was not so naive not to realize that by "Hasidic" they meant "Satmar" though they never clarify this.

This book isn't so polarized. At least that's my reading of it. But it's a topic on which people seem to have to take a position. The 2 available are: Satmars are bad so escaping is good, and Satmars are good and escapers are heretics and likely also liars about what they report.

The first position can often be generalized as secular is good, religion is bad. The later as secular is bad and those who choose it are damned. I refuse to take any of these positions. This being a first book by someone who grew up in relative isolation, I have trouble seeing the author as a mastermind scheming to bring down the Satmars. She has a naïveté which makes her a fresh observer. I attribute the problems she is condemned for more to inexperience than to malice.

I don't think this book makes the Satmars look any worse than a lot of other groups of people. Most of them seemed to mean as well as the secular people in our lives and be doing what they think of as their best (even if we would be making different decisions than the ones they made.) If they're at times mean spirited, selfish ignorant or intolerant, so are large swaths of the secular population. E.g. They aren't being cruel by keeping their children ignorant of secular culture, they imagine they're doing them a favor. (Indeed there are many aspect to secular culture that I wish I was ignorant of.)

The book is mostly not about "scandalous rejection". It's mostly about what it felt like to grow up a Satmar but somehow remaining skeptical. Still, what looks like exotic customs and ways of dress from the outside, look normal from the inside and it's we outsiders who look and act peculiarly. When the rejection happens, it's late in the book and it's not an "I hate you--I'm outahere!" kind of thing, but more of a gradual process and finally going too far to ever turn back.

The writing allowed me, who easily loses interest in a book, to finish it in a day and a half. That alone is worth the 4th star.