It's fitting that the year's last book should also be one of the best. Fatima Farheen Mirza's A Place for Us is a provocative, heartrending read that opens with a family wedding: eldest daughter Hadia is getting married - a love match, not arranged - and has invited her estranged younger brother to be present for her big day.
From that opening, Mirza's story spins backward in time, to Hadia's parents own wedding - arranged - and the lives they forged in California, far from their beginnings half-a-world away. The family's story, the births of Hadia, younger daughter Huda, and son Amar, unfold gradually, in snapshots recalled from the perspective of different family members. A Place for Us is the story of family life, notably, of the thousand little hurts that accumulate, the sibling rivalries, offhand comments, sideways glances whose damage is greater than a single, great betrayal.
This particular iteration of a story as old as time explores the immigrant experience and the experience of being Muslim in America in the years after September 11, but the framework is the shared experience of belonging to a family in which the members do not always understand one another, and the cumulative damage such misunderstandings can wreak over time. What makes Mirza's work so impressively powerful is that for much of the book, nothing really happens. This isn't a book about which one can easily write a complete synopsis; relatively early I even debated putting it down, so unassuming and ordinary was the plot. It's only as the book reaches its conclusion that it all becomes clear, and my admiration for what Mirza accomplished here, complete.
Five stars.
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