Gravity

By Leanne Lieberman

Ellie Gold is an orthodox Jewish teenager living in Toronto in the late eighties. Ellie has no doubts about her strict religious upbringing until she falls in love with another girl at her grandmother's cottage. Aware that homosexuality clashes with Jewish observance, Ellie feels forced to either alter her sexuality or leave her community. Meanwhile, Ellie's mother, Chana, becomes convinced she has a messianic role to play, and her sister, Neshama, chafes against the restrictions of her faith. Ellie is afraid there is no way to be both gay and Jewish, but her mother and sister offer alternative concepts of God that help Ellie find a place for herself as a queer Jew.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
• Release date: Oct 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781554690503

Leanne Lieberman

LEANNE LIEBERMAN is the author of five young adult novels, including The Most Dangerous Thing, Gravity (Sydney Taylor Notable), The Book of Trees and Lauren Yanofsky Hates the Holocaust (Sydney Taylor Notable and Bank Street Best Book). Her adult fiction has been published in New Quarterly, Descant, Fireweed, the Antigonish Review and Grain. She’s a schoolteacher in Kingston, Ontario.

Reviews for Gravity

[edgoldberg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ellie Gold is spending the summer with her Grandmother, her Bubbie, just the two of them at the cottage she rents every year by a lake. Ellie's parents are off to Israel for the summer and her sister, Nashama is a counselor at an all girls camp. Ellie's parents are Orthodox Jews but weren't always. Her Bubbie, her mother's mother, is not really observant but Ellie promises to say her daily prayers and keep Shabbat while at the cottage.For the first few weeks it's just the two of them but one day Ellie meets Lindsay whose mother has a house on the other side of the lake. They begin to hang out...two totally different girls, one Jewish the other not, one serious the other not. For Ellie at least, there is a physical attraction that Lindsay seems to reciprocate. However, this goes against all the Jewish laws that Ellie has been taught. Neshama has always been the rebel in the family, spurning the rituals. Ellie has always been the good girl. However the more she tries to rid her mind of Lindsay, the more she thinks about her.Gravity deals with a serious topic among the Orthodox Jewish community. Homosexuality is a sin and many Orthodox Jews mourn anyone who spurns the teachings and becomes more secular, let alone coming out as a lesbian. And while the book does a good job of explaining the feelings of a 15 year old child torn between the girl she thinks she loves and the rules and laws that have been indoctrinated into her head, the ending may not be realistic and that's why this book gets only 3 1/2 stars.

[pagei_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Elle is 15, Jewish and questioning whether her faith is relevant to her life. She is a lesbian which the Torah says is wrong. After her mom relates faith to gravity, you can't see it but it's there she sees that she can be both Jewish and a lesbian and be okay.

[helgagrace · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Gravity is set in the 80s in Toronto and revolves around a family of Orthodox Jews. Although the narrative is from the perspective of the younger daughter, Ellisheva Gold, who falls in love with a girl she meets while on vacation, the story is really about the entire family and their struggle with faith. Ellie's mother works to find ways to express her faith despite the restrictive confines of orthodoxy, Ellie's sister Neshama is determined to leave and never look back as soon as she finishes high school, and Ellie's father believes that if the Jews had been more observant, the Holocaust would never have happened. Against this background, Ellie fights doggedly against her attraction to Lindsay and also her desire to know more about the world and science than her religion finds strictly acceptable. When she accepts that she does prefer girls over boys, she must come to terms with what that means for her belief in God. The story resonates at the end with the balance she finds between her faith and her sexuality.

[nansilverrod · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Good girl Ellen Gold has been comfortable in her Orthodox Jewish life until she meets and falls for Lindsay. She consults the Torah, and anonymously writes the Rabbi's wife for advice. In order not to think about her, she memorizes the periodical table, the Latin names of sea stars, pulls out her hair, bites the inside of her cheek until it bleeds, etc.She finally begins sneaking over to Lindsay's house after school where she guiltily indulges her desires. With her older sister's encouragement, she begins to accept herself, and also to realize that Lindsay is not the person she would risk losing her family over. The change in Ellen is a bit too facile, while her angst seems very real.

[teencentral · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A great different take on the normal "queer teen in a religious community" story. Here, she finds her own space within the religion she loves. There are some titillating descriptions here, some fairly explicit sexuality. There are certainly a bunch of problems as well; a lot of mistakes i associate with debut authors. And it is set in the time of my childhood, a common habit among Gen-X YA authors that drives me batty. I understand exactly what she is trying to describe when she talks about the New Kids on the Block, but current YA readers were largely born after NKOB had lost all popularity.