Rating: 
Summary: Kaaterskill Falls Rocks!
Review: As someone with largely Catholic heritage (the expression "recovering Catholic" applies neatly here), I worried that I would find no point of entry into Goodman's book for one who knows little about Judaism and especially Orthodox Judaism. How wrong I was. In her careful chronicle of a relationship, a community, a family of people with faith, Kaaterskill Falls eludes cliche' or severity. That overweening, heavy sense of Faith that so often invades novels involving religion, so that my fellow 20-somethings and I cower and read High Fidelity instead -- that is nowhere to be found here. Instead, against the backdrop of tangibly beautiful, almost edible countrysides, men and women shed their city personas and relax. You taste the cherry rugelach they eat, you feel the heat of an argument based on faith -- you must have had one at some point in your life -- and this book reflects such everyday experience with subtlety and wit.The love story is so true; so full of angles and points, and tiny discussions about daily life. Goodman leaves in the tangible and leaves out "summer vacation" schmaltz, the absence of which one reviewer bemoans. A beautiful, respectful, unintimidating novel.
Rating: 
Summary: stars fall on cucumber pies
Review: This is one of those books where a lot happens but nothing is really resolved or accomplished. The best-developed plots were about Elizabeth wanting her own store and the ailing Rav Kirsher's conflict over whether to pass the reins down to his secular and unmarried but brilliant son Jeremy or his more more rigid, sectarian, and observant son Isaiah, who has a wife and child. Still, even when those plots get resolved more or less, nothing really comes of them that drastically affect the plot or the outcome of the entire story. There were also the characters who disappeared without any reason or explanation, like Una, the old woman who lives alone, and Renee's non-Jewish friend Stephanie and her family. There were so many interesting things going on that I wish would have been developed into something more, like Chana's illicit interest in Israel, Andras's growing struggle against his wife's religiosity, and Michael King's secret, but nothing really gets wrapped up or accomplished, not even with the two best-developed storylines. And as a number of other reviewers have pointed out, there are glaring inaccuracies about how a Hassidic or right-wing Orthodox community would have been keeping kosher, in the Seventies or even today, such as how they're eating food in the houses of people who aren't in the same group as they are, or eating products that don't have the stamp of approval from their own people, or the supervision of the goods that are being shipped to Elizabeth's store in Kaaterskill Falls. Although at least it was interesting, in spite of being full of dead-end plots.
Rating:
Summary: this is what a loving marriage is about
Review: Although many readers have commented on Elizabeth (a truly captivating character), her husband Isaac has been given short shift. He appears in one of the book's most poignant scenes as he straightens up after the Rosh Hashana dinner and, in an act of private accounting, chastises himself for his reluctance to support his wife in her desire to open a store. Analyzing his failings with the same critical eye he might bring to a scholarly text, Isaac then resolves to mend his ways. This scene is almost unsurpassed in its portrayal of a tender and intensely religious Jewish sensibility (surpassed, in my reading, only by Chaim Grade in the closing section of the second novella in his magnificant "Rabbis and Wives").
Rating:
Summary: A Community Comes to Life
Review: I see that other reviewers have been put off by the lack of "action" in this novel, but I saw the book as contemplative rather than slow, "intense as prayer," as the book itself says. I often feel as though we assume that women in deeply religious communities are mindless and oppressed, but Goodman's depiction of the internal struggles of Elizabeth Shulman, the young mother in an strictly Orthodox family, made her seem like a whole, real person, not just a stereotype in a wig and modest clothing. (She is also quite a bit more likeable than the character Sharon of Goodman's book Paradise Park, who was by comparison a self-obsessed airhead.) Definitely my favorite of Goodman's books.
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