The Fruit of Her Hands

July 27, 2009
With a powerful immediacy, Cameron's meticulously researched historical is told by Shira, an anomalous 13th-century woman raised (and educated) like a son by her widowed father. After falling in love with and marrying the legendary Rabbi Meir ben Baruch, one of her father's most promising students, Shira's beauty and education attract the attention of a French scholar, Nicholas Donin, whose demented vendetta against Judaism threatens the lives of Jews across Europe. Shira and Meir must defend their faith and their marriage from Donin, and take a stand against the anti-Semitism choking Europe, but Shira is a passive, if touching, heroine. Shira is easy to identify with, but not very interesting. Still, readers will drink in the historical detail and be quick to forgive Shira's weaknesses for the sake of other rich characters like Donin and Baruch.