A Place for Us

4.5 stars - maybe a 5, need to ponder more. Mirza did an excellent job of jumping back and forth between narrators and periods of time, but without losing the story's thread. At times the family conflict felt a bit contrived to me, but I also say that as someone without siblings or such a complicated faith-cultural foundation. The last part of the book pushed this book into memorable territory for me, and I'd suggest having some tissues nearby.

3.75
It's the last section of the book that bumped a whole star up for me.

What I loved about A Place for Us was the way Mirza seamlessly weaves together family, identity, religion, and love. Each character struggles with each of those things in his or her own way, and Mizra used their different points of view to narrate the story so very well. It pulled me in and endeared me to each character separately, which gave me a unique perspective of each one, even when the story was being told from another's point of view.

While I really loved that portion of the way this book was written, I had a hard time with the time jumps. I can see how they added to the story, with seeing an incident and then going back into the past to explain how the characters are the way they are or into the future to see how it affected them, but you'll just be reading sections of a chapter and suddenly be in a different time AND from a different perspective. It all just got a little discombobulating, orienting yourself back with another character in another time altogether.

Another thing that I really did like about this book is that it's about being Muslim in America, yet family and relationships are the focus, not that. It's definitely a piece of the novel, having clearly affected each character, but it's not the focus. I felt like this book could have run away in that direction, but it really didn't. While I'd like to read something like this about being a Muslim in America during the last two decades or so, I was glad that the story continued to focus on family from beginning to end.

Overall, A Place for Us was a fantastic read, and one that I definitely recommend picking up.