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Title: Read Ragen's other books first
Review: Though I gave the book four stars, it is clearly not the book "Sotah" and "Jephte's Daughter" were. There was too much of getting the message across rather than true story-telling in "Sacrifice," and Ragen is usually a superb story-teller. I neither thought the book was racist nor denegrating of Orthodox Judaism, and I feel the readers who "saw" those elements in the book were projecting them because they were only reading the surface. The emotions and opinions of Tamar and the other characters are valid as far as what is happening in this particular story. Calling the author a racist is confusing her with her characters. I just wish things hadn't tipped so far into melodrama and polemic. I haven't found Ragen's characters to be such stick figures before; they're usually more three-dimensional.
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