Miriam and Abraham are the central characters in the Song of the Magdalene. Miriam's youthful exuberance is set forth early in the novel as she struggles to be the good Jewess her father would have her be. The valley calls her each day. "If I didn't go, I'd burst from within. The open beckoned me."

Miriam's heart yearns to run and rejoice— to glory in all that is. The prohibitions of the veil and all the rituals of order required of observant Jewish women threaten to throttle her very soul. The onset of her first seizure beneath the "blue, blue sky" she loves and the fear of possession by demons serves as further evidence that Napoli is using the realities of Miriam's religious and social strictures and the agony of her epileptic seizures as a dual imprisonment—a theme that is repeated...