Like No Other

When sixteen-year-old Devorah Blum, a Hasidic Jew, meets nerdy-but-cool black high-schooler, Jaxon Hunte, romance ignites in Una LaMarche’s contemporary young adult romance, Like No Other (2014). Their love tests their commitments to their culture, religion, and each other. As the novel progresses, each teen learns valuable lessons about themselves and what they want out of life. Exploring themes of family, tradition, and discrimination, Like No Other was nominated for the Keystone to Reading Book Award for High School in 2017.

Devorah and Jaxon tell the story of their forbidden relationship in alternating first-person points-of-view, starting with Devorah. A category 3 hurricane is headed for Brooklyn, New York. Devorah watches rain battering the hospital windows from her seat in a stuffy waiting room: the hospital has shut off the air conditioning to save power. Devorah is anxious. Her eighteen-year-old sister, Rose, is about to give birth, a dangerous seven weeks early. Rose’s husband, Jacob, is there also, but he isn’t much use. Because of the laws of the Hasidic sect they belong to, the Chabad-Lubavitch, Jacob is forbidden to be in the room when Rose enters childbirth, so Devorah takes his place.

Devorah doesn’t like Jacob. She thinks he “prides himself on his piety” and talks down to everyone except her father. Jacob takes his role as a member of the Shomrim, a volunteer neighborhood patrol group, very seriously. His marriage to Rose was arranged by a shadchan, or matchmaker. Devorah thinks Rose lost her sense of fun when she married Jacob. Devorah knows that in a few years her parents will arrange a match for her, and soon after, she’ll be pregnant. Devorah has grown up knowing that marriage comes first and then love follows, a reversal of the traditional schoolyard rhyme. She has been told there is no greater happiness outside their strict, close-knit Hasidic community, but she wonders if that is true.



The baby, Liya Sara, arrives safely, and Devorah takes the elevator down to the hospital cafeteria. Too late, she realizes that there is a teenage boy with her in the elevator; she is violating the law of yichud by being alone with a strange man. Devorah is horrified: She is not a rule-breaker. Her best friend, Shoshana, calls her “frum,” or goody-two-shoes.

Jaxon is at the hospital because his best friend, Ryan, hurt his shoulder in a skateboard stunt while trying to show off for a girl. Jaxon is West Indian, and the first-generation of his family born in the U.S. He is also the only boy in a family of four girls. He gets good grades in school, knowing how important education is to his parents. Jaxon feels that he isn’t smooth around girls—he has a crush on Polly, the girl Ryan was showing off for, but can’t seem to impress her. Riding the elevator down to the cafeteria, he notices Devorah’s long dark hair, pretty face, and beautiful gray eyes.

Devorah notices Jaxon’s broad back and sinewy muscles and his smoky dark skin. The power goes out and the two are stuck together. At first, Devorah does not respond to Jaxon’s kindly comments, despite his best warm, deep radio announcer voice. Gradually Devorah realizes Jaxon has been trying to put her at her ease and the two begin to talk. They discover they are neighbors, living on opposite sides of the same Brooklyn street. Devorah is jealous that the future is open for Jaxon, while hers is fixed. The two feel an instant connection. When the power returns, however, they part.



But Jaxon and Devorah are very much on each other’s minds. One day, while working at the family paper goods store, Devorah takes a chance and visits Jaxon in the nearby fast food restaurant where he works. They arrange to meet secretly. Devorah goes to the rendezvous, but Jaxon can’t make it. He later manages to visit Devorah in the hospital when her family is visiting Liya Sara. Finding privacy in an empty stairwell, Jaxon apologizes for standing Devorah up and kisses her. Devorah knows that a relationship will never work, but they plan to meet again.

Devorah begins lying to her parents, breaking religious restrictions, and sneaking around to see Jaxon. Jaxon’s commitments to school and his job slip. Both face censure from family and friends. Devorah’s father comments that the people on Jaxon’s side of the street are “not our people.” Similarly, Jaxon’s supervisor tells him that the Orthodox Jewish people on Devorah’s side of the street are “not like us. And they don’t like us.” But Jaxon and Devorah believe they love each other.

Jacob observes Devorah with Jaxon and warns Devorah to stop seeing him or Jacob will tell her father. Jaxon urges Devorah to go away with him for a night to work on their relationship. When he picks her up, they are discovered by Jacob and the Shomrim. One of the Shomrim beats Jaxon up, and Jacob takes Devorah home.



Devorah’s family sends her to the Chabad Residential Treatment Center—a home for defiant teens. Her parents quickly arrange a match for her, but Devorah dodges it by getting her potential husband, David, to admit he doesn’t want to marry her. Devorah tells her parents and her rabbi that she wants more freedom and independence. Meeting Jaxon has shown her that life has more opportunities. She reflects, “I saw life that was so different from the one I’d been living. I saw a future that could be so different.”

Devorah breaks off her relationship with Jaxon and convinces her family to let her go to college and to quit trying to arrange marriages for her. Jaxon realizes that he wants to spend his life helping other people find their own paths in life.