[In the review below, Taylor argues that while the novel is acceptable, it will fail to appeal to a wide audience.]

In this gay-oriented novel of fraternal estrangement, Jonathan Rosenbaum (straight) severs relations with his gay twin, Jacob, after interrupting him in the act. So Jacob's role as family emissary to persuade Jonathan to leave an Israeli yeshiva ends in a fiasco. Back in Boston, Jacob resumes wrestling with his life's dilemmas of coming out to relatives and finding a lover. Debut novelist Lowenthal expresses 24-year-old Jacob's world through flashbacks to his adolescence and family events of Jewish religious ritual and personal sexual awakening, then switches to Jacob's 1990s activities as a gay activist. This telling fills space until the necessary plot resolution: the reappearance of Jonathan. Their grandmother's stroke provides the pretext, and together they reach a deeper recognition of her past as a Holocaust survivor, inducing a greater understanding, though not a reconciliation, between the twins and their opposed lifestyles. [The Same Embrace is a] a predictable work that realizes the standard issues of being gay without offering much appeal beyond its core readership.