*2.5

This wasn't the worst but it could have been better. I liked that he was learning about her religion and trying to understand her beliefs. I really did not understand why she felt like she needed to marry Zevi. If the book focused more on her and Sam I think it would have been immensely better.

I received an arc through netgalley.

My heart always does a flip whenever I see Jewish books on NetGalley. It’s even better when I have time in my reading schedule for them. I requested Unorthodox Love by Heidi Shertok (Alcove Press, 2023) as soon as I spotted it, and then waited. And waited. And waited. And when I was finally approved, of course I already had a stack of books I needed to get to first! Such is the way of a reader’s life. But when I was finally able to dive in, I discovered a read that had been worth the wait.

At twenty-nine and unmarried in a community where young women most often get married by their early twenties, Penina Kalish is practically geriatric in the Orthodox world. A medical condition ensures that she’ll never have children, and as this is something extremely important to Orthodox Jews, Penina knows she’s damaged goods and unlikely to find a husband. The dates she does go on, set up by a feisty but out-of-touch matchmaker, never go well. So Penina focuses on her family, her volunteer work holding babies at the local NICU, and her job at a local jewelry store. She’s doing her best to make her life as fulfilling as possible, no matter how much she wants what she can't have.

But everything changes the day a handsome stranger walks through the NICU. This man, Sam Kleinfeld, ends up being Penina’s new boss, the son of the jewelry store’s owner. He’s filthy rich, incredibly handsome, Jewish (though not Orthodox), single (or is he?), and more than a little grumpy. As Penina gets to know him, she realizes how easy it would be to love him, but she’s damaged, he’s not Orthodox, and there’s that super gorgeous, bikini-sporting doctor who keeps tagging him in Facebook photos. So many reasons he’s off-limits.

But as Penina struggles to keep her heart in check and help save her sister’s house, she’ll learn a thing or two about how not damaged she is, what makes a person whole, and maybe she’ll fall in love along the way.
Super cute romance. It’s set in an Orthodox Jewish community, but as Sam is a secular (non-religious) Jew, he needs certain things explained to him and thus he serves well as a point of education for readers who may not be familiar with terms and traditions common among the Orthodox. Penina truly is Every Woman, dealing with not just health challenges that have set the course for her life, but with everyday bouts of awkwardness, like coffee spills, wardrobe malfunctions (a very minor plot point is Penina’s role as a modest fashion influencer on Instagram, which was fun), and constantly managing to say the wrong thing, especially while nervously babbling to fill the silence. Same, girl.

Sam is gruff, a little rough around the edges, but with a good heart. His status as a bit of an outsider, as non-Orthodox, is what allows him to more fully see Penina; to him, she’s not broken or missing something essential like she’s learned to think of herself. Their relationship, always following the strict rules of comportment laid out by Orthodox Judaism, grows, twisting and turning as Penina begins to accept that despite her lack of ability to have children, there’s nothing wrong with her. While at times I felt Sam was maybe a little too gruff (or at least too gruff for my liking, but that’s a personal preference), the two make a good pair.

The ending was exactly what I expected - not just the usual romance HEA, but…I won’t give any spoilers, but in that context, it’s the only acceptable solution. How realistic it is, I don’t know; it’s one I’ve seen before in other outsider-falls-in-love-with-insider type romances, and it always pulls me out of the story just a little bit because I’m wondering about the practicality of it, and how it would work out long-term. But overall, Orthodox Love is a cute, fun romance that gives you a peek inside a world most people aren’t familiar with, and I love that.

Unorthodox Love will be available at your favorite retailers July 11, 2023. Huge thanks to NetGalley, Alcove Press, and Heidi Shertok for allowing me to read and review an advance copy. Support your local bookstores!

Genre: Fiction, Romance
Actual Rating: 4 stars
Spicy Meter: 1 fire emoji
Content Warnings: Deals heavily with infertility and parental sickness. Mentions cancer.

“Unorthodox Love” follows Penina, an Orthodox Jewish 29-year-old that at this point has lost all hopes on getting married—she’s infertile and no proper Orthodox Jew will be okay with not having children of their own. But then in comes an indecent proposal—she is to marry a wealthy (secretly gay) Orthodox Jew in exchange for solving all her family’s monetary problems. It’s a perfect arrangement… so why can’t she stop thinking about Sam, the perfectly secular, objectively attractive, son of her boss, who’ll now be her interim boss as his father is receiving cancer treatment. It makes no sense, he is all she can’t have, so why even give it a second thought, right? Well, wrong.

I loved Heidi Shertok’s writing, it was both engaging and entertaining. I am usually not the biggest fan of clean romance but I must say “Unorthodox Love” left me completely content with this love story. It is truly astonishing this is a debut novel, I honestly can’t wait and see where Heidi’ll take us next.

I hate when a main character or heroine in a romance novel has to leave aside her beliefs (let that be religious or otherwise) to find a happily ever after. I am so so happy this was not the case for Penina.

Don’t hesitate to grab “Unorthodox Love” if you’re looking for a clean workplace romance where opposites attract and religion is a prominent subject (and where an adorably awkward meet-cute was in play).

If you click here, you’ll be redirected to Goodreads, so you can add the book to your TBR list.

Or you could click here, and be redirected to Amazon, so you can order the book.

ARC provided by NetGalley and Alcove Press in exchange for an honest review.

Publication Date: July 11, 2023

“I’m sweating like a mohel about to perform his first circumcision”. I absolutely loved the prominent Judaism in this romance! Our holidays, traditions, and values are showcased so beautifully and with humor!
I love that Penina, the main character, has a such a big heart and strong sense of self and I definitely would follow her influencer account in real life!

I also want to point out how much I appreciated the strong message of acceptance throughout this book! I will add though a TW for infertility. I wish I had that ahead of time personally.

Thank you @heidishertok @dreamscape @netgalley for the ARC!

This is not a book I would normally pick up, and I think that is why I enjoyed it so much. I learned a lot about the Jewish faith through the main character and her dating struggles. I felt bad that she was not considered suitable dating material because of her fertility. I have found myself thinking of the book and characters from time to time.

Unorthodox Love was a combination of some pearl-clutching tension, laughs, and an inside look into a religion that I had little knowledge about. Penina was so relatable in the 'have to take care of everyone' trope and I really loved watching her slowly come into the acceptance that you simply can not protect everyone in your family all the time. Those moments of hurt and learning lessons are just as important as the moments of joy and celebration.

I was expecting the fake marriage trope to take a larger part, though I'm not sure why because it's not like I was expecting the gay man to magically fall in love with her. I think it was more wanting a deeper fleshing out of their friendship and the aftermath. The tension and heat between her and Sam was balanced well and while reading other reviewers noting that Sam was unbearably rude and mean, I didn't experience that as much. Maybe I was too focused on all of the other character relationships that were floating around that I just didn't notice?

This was a feel good story that really opened my eyes into some of the customs and beliefs of Orthodox Judaism that was worked into the story without feeling like it was preachy or too heavy in a school education way.

Thank you Netgalley and Alcove Press for the advanced copy.

I liked the premise of this book, but this book ended up being an absolute mess. Panina is a relatable, frazzled heroine. There's nothing appealing about Sam, other than his supposed good looks.
This book has an unexpected amount of medical content, from casual mentions of illnesses and injuries, to main plot points of cancer, infertility, and other ailments. I found it a bit jarring.
The audiobook is possibly the worst I've ever listened to. The narrator pronounces words- common English words, and Yiddish and Hebrew, extremely weirdly.

2.5 stars (rounded up)

"Orthodox Love" by Heidi Shertok is a romantic comedy that is very, very, very slow to unfold. I am 35% into the book and basically, only one major thing has happened?! 50% in and I am feeling much the same. I think I know where this story is going, and I don't love it. I did manage to laugh a few times while reading this book. I also enjoyed learning about the intricacies of the Orthodox Jewish religion, which I knew little about. I had no idea that the Orthodox Jewish religion was so strict with its rules on adoption (well, pretty much everything, as it turns out). Seems pretty antithetical to the ideas of religion to me to leave children desperate for a home behind, but I digress. I felt that the main character, Penina, instructed and corrected and admonished others who were not of her faith far too much for my liking. Most of the time, these slights are passed off as jokes, but they felt very judgmental to me. I did like how Penina is able to coexist in the secular world while still adhering to her Orthodox Jewish faith as she reconciles the more progressive, modern future with the archaic, aged past. Apart from this, I did feel deeply bad for Penina, who has always wanted to have a child but, because of a medical condition that rendered her infertile, cannot have children. That experience shaped who she has become as an adult. She has always tried to do what she can to be near children and give back to her community, volunteering in the NICU at a local hospital to fulfill some part of her dream of having kids. As someone who is childless by choice, just because I don't want kids doesn't mean I can't empathize and sympathize with Penina's yearning to have a baby. Marriage and babies are apparently a huge part of the Orthodox Jewish faith. However, Penina is SO desperate to find a man, and she is SO down on herself for being infertile that it really started to grate on my nerves! Her choices wind up being someone who is gay who is offering her money and someone who doesn't exactly share the same religious views as her. This doesn't sit right with me at all and feels shamey to people in the LGBTQIA2S+ community, like it would be better for Zevi to fake being someone he's not just to please his dying mother rather than be out and proud. Yikes. To me, Penina's relationship with Sam felt forced, not angsty. He could have literally been anyone else who gave her even a modicum of attention and she would have been head-over-heels. I'm usually all for the grumpy-sunshine trope, but Sam's grumpiness felt more mean and angry than sexy and brooding. There need to be more books representing the various forms of Jewish faith in romantic fiction. Some readers will find more to love here than I did. Unfortunately, I didn't think there was enough differentiation between the voices of the characters in the audiobook narration to call it successful. Because of this, some of the characters were muddled together and it became confusing. I had to stop listening and pick the book back up later because the voices became a bit too cluttered.

Thank you to NetGalley, Heidi Shertok, and Alcove Press for the complimentary ARC of this book. All opinions are my own. I was not compensated for my review.

i could not get into it but the idea of the book was really cute. i loved the idea of what the book was supposed to be about but honestly i got bored about 50% in

This is contemporary romance for sure, but oh so clean! Main character Penina is 29, which seems like a great age for a romance main character - she's older, wiser, and more mature. I also loved that Penina was unabashedly an Orthodox Jew, with the subsequent explanations of the customs and practices (making it very accessible for the non-Jewish reader). I was totally rooting for Penina to find her happy after the whole time, and adored Sam for the most part. It was funny in parts, and a nice cast of secondary characters.

But I struggled with this book. I wanted to absolutely love it and shout about it from the rooftops - we need more Jewish romance being published. However I was uncomfortable with the two choices that Penina had - marry a rich gay man and fix her sisters' financial problems OR have romantic lead Sam change his religious practices (or Penina decide that they weren't actually that important to her) made me uncomfortable. While I adored the ending and it really wrapped up things nicely, it was the middle of the book where I struggled. I also felt uncomfortable with how much of a jerk Sam was in the beginning, and how that was okay because it turns out he had feelings the whole time for her. Would I still recommend this book? Definitely! We need more Jewish romance, and I would love to see another book by Heidi Shertok!

I really loved this one. I loved the way Penina was able to be part of the secular world and the Orthodox Jewish world at the same time. Her family reminded me of my cousins, the way we are all just such a mess of oversharing and so protective over each other.
I loved the friends that Penina has, I really liked Maya. I loved the relationship Penina has with her sisters, they were all so filled with so much personality.
The writing was easy to read and I really loved this story.

Penina is 29 and unmarried in an Orthodox Jewish community that values early marriage and many children. Not her fault- she's considered damaged goods because of a congenital condition that makes it impossible for her to have children. And adoption is not an option (I learned something). She's happy working in a jewelry store and as an influencer for modest fashion and then....Sam turns up. The son of the owner of the store, he's gorgeous. And smart. And interested in her. But Penina has been working with a marriage broker and she's considering a fake marriage to Zevi to get the money her sister needs to save her house. Fans of the rom com know how this will end but wait- this is very different from the usual. Shertok has smoothly incorporated Orthodox life and laws into the story and made it special. Penina is a great character, as are the rest. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. Shertok's a good storyteller and I very much enjoyed this.

I had found myself on Jewish Orthodox TikTok and then the approval for this book happened - I was really enjoyed in the moments where the FMC talked about her style and the interaction with social media, I wish there were more of those.

But then there was just too much of a lot - death of a family member, infertility, cancer, and we just never got to really know her. I wanted to love Sam more, but he was described negatively often and it stuck.

I could really see how the author wanted those of who were people pleasers to connect with the Penina and as one I did - but it was repetitive and I was hoping that she would work through it a little more.

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this in exchange for my review.

I have mixed feelings on this forbidden, slow burn, friends to lovers, interfaith romance. On the one hand I really enjoyed learning more about the Orthodox Jewish lifestyle and the strict restrictions adherents follow but on the other hand I felt the book was longer than it needed to be and dragged a bit in the middle.

There was great disability rep (the heroine, Penina has a misshaped uterus that makes her infertile and unable to bear children) - a condition I hadn't heard of before and causes her a great deal of distress as a woman raised and wanting children of her own. Recommended for fans of Jean Meltzer and good on audio narrated by Caitlin Thorburn.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for early digital and audio copies in exchange for my honest review. I hope we get more stories featuring Penina's sisters!

Premise:
29-year-old virgin Orthodox Jew Penina has been going on dates set up by her matchmaker for basically a decade now, and she thinks she has had enough. She finally meets Zevi, a closeted gay man, who offers her a fake marriage and a promise to pay off her family debt, in exchange for being his wife to cover up his sexual orientation. She is open to this idea but her new boss, Sam, and her feelings for him, are getting in the way of this plan. Penina also runs a social media account about modest fashion, and in her downtime, she volunteers at the NICU by holding babies.

Tropes:
grumpy x sunshine
slow burn
giving-up-something-for-love
no pregnancy epilogue
outsider-falls-inlove-with-insider / from-different-worlds

Thoughts:
I am not secular or Orthodox Jewish (I was raised in a Roman Catholic household & have since explored my spirituality outside beyond just that religion); all this to say, I cannot speak to the authenticity of both the secular and Orthodox Jewish representation in this. I can say that I appreciated that Sam was secular so that when he was asking questions, that felt authentic and operated as a device to inform readers about Penina's Orthodox Jewish culture. I loved that and think it flowed really well! I also deeply appreciated the representation of adoption because I think more people should consider it, even if you're not infertile. *hot takes are made here, cry about it!*

As far as the slow burn, I thought that was well fleshed out because they could not touch or kiss, so you could really feel the angst! There were some descriptive language that frustrates me in cishet romance sometimes, with leaning on gender stereotypes too heavily, like describing the MMC as masculine, big, etc. I just find that in 2023, there are thousands of other words to describe someone without using vague/outdated words like "masculine" or "feminine" without further explaining what that means and what gender stereotype you're enforcing.

Anyway, for the most part, I really liked Penina because she was a silly goofy millennial and her at her most awkward moments? I get it babe. That's me too lol. A fluffy, fun romance with lots of information about Orthodox Jewish culture & important discussions on a woman's worth when she is infertile. More infertile FMCs please!

Penina is a 29 year old Orthodox woman on the quest to find her perfect mate. However, due to infertility, she is having a hard time doing this. The shadchanim are setting her up with older men, mommy’s boys, and overall inappropriate matches. Until she meets the man who will solve all her problems. A secretly gay man, Zevi offers to marry her in exchange for a sum of money that will put her family’s financial problems to bed. One thing stands in her way through, Sam Kleinfeld, her new boss. Sam is a rugged, good looking, hard working businessman who does not take any nonsense from Penina. He opposes the plan and comes up with ways to prevent her marriage. Through a series of events, Sam shows Penina that she does not need to give up the future she wants just because she can’t have children and eventually convinces her of her worth as a woman. While not religious himself, Sam learns to appreciate Penina’s Judaism and the effect it has on her, and ultimately brings the two of them closer together.
Not a traditional romance as the title conveys, Unorthodox Love by Heidi Shertok coming in July from Alcove Press, is a delightful twist on the boy meets girls genre and will be thoroughly enjoyed by lovers of chic lit.

How was this a debut novel?! Penin and her struggle to find love and discover who she is and who she wants to be in her community despite her own personal challenges won my heart from the start.

This was my first time reading something by this author and it was quite an enjoyable experience. The story was unique and caught my attention from the beginning and held it all the way through. I enjoyed learning about a new culture and the author did a nice job of depicting the traditions and practices and helped the reader really understand the customs. The book definitely left me with a smile on my face afterwards. The characters were interesting and well-developed with realistic qualities that gave them an authentic personality and were easily relatable. The story was delightful and interesting and I look forward to reading more by this author.
I received a complimentary copy from Netgalley and am voluntarily leaving my review.

Penina Kalish is 29 and is Orthodox Jewish. She enjoys her job working in a jewelry story. Because of health issue she is unable to have children which for her means matchmakers pair her up with less than ideal candidates. She is also overly empathic wanting to help people and solve their problems. When her sister is on the verge of losing her home Penina is willing to do anything to help, including entering into a marriage with a Gay Jew as his beard. But her bigger distraction is new boss Sam Kleinfeld. He is gorgeous, abrupt and although Jewish he isn’t Orthodox.

There is a lot to like in this debut novel. I enjoyed learning about the Jewish rules and customs that aren’t more universally known. I like Penina and that she lives her religion and finds joy in it. But also she can still read trashy romances and treats herself to nice lingerie. Much of the humor in the book comes from a few terrible dates Penina endures. I think her family, especially mom with her lack of boundaries is suppose to be funny, but I cringed more than laughed.

This is very much a slow burn romance. In keeping with the faith traditions there can’t be any touching or stolen kisses. You do get Penina’s longing and even lusting thoughts for Sam but don’t see it reciprocated. So it’s hard to see more than friendship as they talk about their families and lives. Of course you can see where it is going but it takes ages to get there. I was glad to see the epilogue and the beginning of the HEA.

Thank you to NetGalley and Alcove Press for the ARC and I am leaving a voluntary review. (3.5 Stars)

Not my typical genre but I loved it! It was sweet, funny, and heartfelt all at once. The storyline was easy to get into and the characters were relatable and easy to connect with.