There’s something inexplicably sweet about growing up female in an Orthodox Jewish community. The women’s singing and baking groups, the close knit families, the ability to unabashedly call your friend “the girls” as if you are the heroine of a Nancy Drew novel. Yet orthodox life can also be challenging, full of rules that restrict your behavior and limit your options. At times it can feel like a society full of clucking tongues “who only want the best for you” are hemming you in with their judgements and their love. It is this delicate push and pull that lies at the center of Leah Scheier’s contemporary YA novel The Last Words We Said.

Set in Atlanta and alternating between present day and flashbacks, the story follows three modern orthodox Jewish girls as they deal with the disappearance of their closest friend, Danny. It is a dark thriller of a ride full of secrets, but it is also a quiet exploration of faith. Each girl handles Danny’s death differently. The viewpoint character, Ellie, insists she still sees him after he is dead. Her friend Deenie throws herself into religion so completely as to be borderline fanatical, taking on “extreme chumras” (stringencies of practice that are not necessarily advised or healthy). The third member of the trio, Rae, heads in the opposite direction. Already questioning her commitment to Judaism before Danny’s death, Rae doubles down into her rebel-against-tradition status after he is gone. She also bakes like a woman possessed.

Many people have a religious phase, “frumming out” as it is colloquially known, during their childhood. Often these are temporary stages while the individual in question works through their own personal dialogue with God and faith. However, in cases like Deenie’s religious practice can become a compulsion used to assuage guilt over real or imagined wrong doing.

Rae’s statement that rebellion is about her, and not about being an awful person to everyone around her, is representation that is sorely lacking in both Jewish fiction and the real world. Leaving the faith is often presented as an all or nothing event in which a person either toes the line or loses their family and become a strung out cautionary tale. Rae presents a third option.

Possibly the most universal experience, even for those not religiously inclined, is Ellie’s. The way Ellie deals with her own transgression of faith right before Danny’s disappearance and her resulting grief will ring true to anyone that has ever kept a secret from someone that is no longer around to hear it.

One of the more controversial practices mentioned in the book revolves around dating and physical intimacy. Simply known as being “shomer,” many Orthodox Jewsish boys and girls do not touch each other.

Ignoring the inherent homophobia here, it is a rule that is again both empowering and humiliating all at once. Especially when you are a teenage girl like Ellie. Because the tricky thing, that Scheier handles so deftly, is that shomer is often treated as an obligation of community morality rather than an option for the benefit of the couple in question. A must rather than a choice.

Outside expectations are layered onto to the burgeoning romance of Danny and Ellie to the point where it becomes hard to decipher what Ellie wants versus what everyone else is telling her to want. She is a young person held up as a paragon of virtue to her peers, put up on a pedestal by a society that uses praise as a cudgel to keep its members in line. Because the moment she became a member of the poster couple for “shomer” what should have been an intimate, personal decision became fodder for community gossip. Which can mess with anyone’s psyche, especially a teen who only a few weeks later then has to cope with the aftermath of her boyfriend’s death.

This is the inherent struggle in Ellie’s life. The reason she cannot let her dead boyfriend go and the reason he, in my opinion, never fully understood her. It is the same reason I feel the men in this book consistently fail to own up to their part of the problem in an equivalent way to the introspection we see from the female characters.

Ellie learns the hard way that no matter how loving and caring your boyfriend is, they will never understand what it means to be a girl in a religious community. That a girls transgression will never be viewed the same way as a boys is. Because while a boy will get off with a few light slaps on the back (some of which are probably congratulatory) breaking the rules will shatter so much more than a girls self image or reputation. Because consequences aren’t the same for female presenting individuals in our communities. They never were and they never will be until we let go of some of our notions about purity and gender bias.

This is a book about secrets kept not out of loyalty but out of fear. Fear that others will judge you if you make a mistake. Fear that those you love might reject you if they know your whole truth. Fear that the only community you know is not ready to embrace you. So for all the heartbreak that ensued, I’m glad that in the end Ellie and her friends learned to truly trust each other.

There is a Jewish concept that everything in this world, every relationship and emotion that we experience, has been put here to help us understand God. The kind of love that these girls have for each other? The kind that never falters even when society tries to use it to tear them down and make them feel small? That’s the kind of love I like to think God has for us all. It is only our fallible human selves that have erred and placed conditions on being a member of our communities, and in doing so we wrong each other.

Which is all a really long-winded way of me encouraging you all to pick up this book and find pieces of yourselves in these wonderful girls. Whether you are religious or not, it will speak to you.

Note: This book was in my to be reviewed pile and I was waiting for my library hold to come in when the author kindly offered an electronic review copy.

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E Broderick is a writer and speculative fiction enthusiast. When not writing she enjoys epic games of trivial pursuit and baking. She currently lives in the U.S. but is eagerly awaiting the day a sentient spaceship offers to take her traveling around the galaxy.