A Place for Us
Ratings32
Average rating4.3
It's the debut novel from 26 year old Fatima Farheen Mirza and the first published under Sarah Jessica Parker's SJP Imprint over at Hogarth. Mirza delivers an absolute stunner.
A Place for Us focuses on Hyderabad Muslims living in America and how they grapple within the confines of their faith and family in a post 9/11 world.
Hadia is getting married as the book opens and is hoping to see her brother Amar who has been missing for years. She is a doctor now, the eldest daughter fulfilling all the heavy expectations of a second generation child. Amar exists in opposition and has strayed from the fold. But naturally it's all a bit more complicated than that.
The story jumps back and forth in time and is told from the perspective of different family members as they recount their lives leading up to Amar's estrangement. The shifts of time and character are handled with the sure hand of someone who feels like they've been doing this for years. Seamless and assured, but I still felt the story sag in the middle. As we build to the climax, I was increasingly impatient for the inevitable collision we're clearly driving towards.
Mirza delivers and just wrecked me. Rafiq, the father is rendered with such clear-eyed understanding that belies the author's young age. Complicated, beautiful and heartfelt. It's like you're watching all the tedious brushwork at the start, sections of colour carefully laid out, but it's not until you step back from the finished canvas that you see how it comes together in a rich, nuanced tapestry that leaves you gasping.
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.
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.