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Book Review: Slow Motion Shows the Meaning of Repentance

Summer is a great time for catching up on reading. You don’t even have to go to the beach to do it.
Slow Motion by Dani Shapiro is a wonderful book.
 
This very interesting memoir is subtitled, “A Memoir Of A Life Rescued By Tragedy”. And so it is.
Dani, a former yeshiva girl and Sarah Lawrence dropout, tells her story. As the book opens her life is dissolute. Dani is living a supposedly glorious life by doing TV commercials and attending to Lenny, her successful lawyer boyfriend who is the married father of her best friend. Yet, with all the drinking and drugs Dani is miserable. Her life takes an even more wicked turn-the death of her beloved father. The jolt of her dad’s illness and subsequent death brings Dani to the realization that her life is not what it should be. Then she decides to do what she believes she must do… for her own sake and her dad’s memory.
 
This decision makes all the difference, as she now becomes a college student and noted author. This is an important book about one woman’s teshuvah (repentance) As we enter the period of Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur and think of what needs altering in our own living, we should know that there can be no more relevant story than Dani’s story. This marvelous book alerts us to the reality that as long as we have life we can change.
 
Shana Tovah