Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie was the winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017. It is a story told in five parts with each part having a different perspective. Isma has been caring for her twin siblings since their mother died when they were twelve, but now they are adults and she heads off to the States to resume her education while they stay in London. 

I'm sort of torn on this book. It was really well done and I felt like I understood the motivations of each character and how and why they were acting the way they were. The writing was clear and powerful. While I'm not crazy about multiple POVs, I thought this was a nice balance because the reader was able to spend multiple chapters with each character before it switched.  I thought it was brave of the author to tackle issues of the Muslim experience in the modern UK and US. I thought the author did a fantastic job of showing how people become radicalized in every direction of the spectrum.

But it was so hard to read. I knew where the story was going because the book was sold as a modern retelling of Antigone and since I knew the ending of Antigone, I wasn't super excited about how this would end. If you haven't read Antigone, no worries, this book can absolutely be read as a standalone. However, while this book was good in so many ways - the writing, the characters, the plot - the topic was so scary and difficult and challenging that I didn't want to read it. 

It seems to me that this is the literature equivalent of vegetables. They can be delicious and wonderful, but it's not always as easy going down as a slice of pecan pie. It's definitely worth a read, but brace yourself because you'll have feelings and you won't know what to do with them.

4/5 stars

Lines of note:

We'll be in touch all the time, she and Aneeka had said to each other in the weeks before she had left. But "touch" was the one thing modern technology didn't allow...(page 13)

I've honestly never thought about this idiom before and it is a silly thing to say, isn't it?

He knew it was a paramount failure of friendship to disappear into a relationship, but to be in his friends' company now felt like stepping back into the aimlessness that had characterized his life before Aneeka came along and become both focus and direction. (page 83)

Young love, right?

...enjoying her evident satisfaction at the clean workings of the cherry pitter she'd mocked not an hour earlier as an accessory of the rich who don't know what else to do with their money. It's a cherry pitter. It pits cherries. How is that some wild extravagance? In response she'd opened a kitchen drawer and held up one utensil after another: A cherry pitter to pit cherries, a garlic peeler to peel garlic, a potato masher to mask potatoes, a lemon zester to zest lemons, an apple corer to core apples. She'd grinned at him. All you need is basic cutlery and a little know-how. (page 95)

My husband has this same issue with single-use kitchen utensils and it gives me a huge charge every single time I use our strawberry huller. It's so delightful and convenient and single-use.

Person I looked up:

Ian Botham (page 101) - English cricket commentator, member of the House of Lords, and former cricketer who has been involved in a lot of controversies and is a tabloid favorite.