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Editor's Pick

January 6, 2021

What a Recent Novel on Modern Orthodox Teenage Rebels Lacks

Sex, drugs, and Zohar?

In his debut novel, the Orchard, David Hopen tells the story of Ari Eden, a seventeen-year-old student at a Modern Orthodox prep school in suburban Florida who falls in with some rebellious classmates. Here, as Michal Leibowitz writes in her review, Ari encounters “a world of opulence, debauchery, and ambition,” complete with “drinking, of course, and drugs and girls.” Hopen adds to this mix a charismatic classmate who entertains Kabbalah-tinged heresies. Leibowitz assesses the book’s strengths, and its weaknesses:

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