The Sharaf family looks like a real American success story. Rahmat and his wife Maryam fled Afghanistan and settled in Virginia. After a series of false starts, Rahmat has a lot of business success and the family becomes wealthy. They have two older children, a girl named Zorah and a boy named Omer, and two young children. But is the family really happy?
The book is told through interviews with friends, neighbors, and witnesses, along with excerpts from journalists and investigators, who tell the story of what happens to the Sharaf family. Public opinion sways back and forth and the book tackles issues of Islamophobia, assimilation, the immigrant experience, and, maybe most importantly, generational conflict in immigrant families.
It's a propulsive read. Since the chapters are short, you feel like you're making a lot of progress fast and you just want to keep flipping pages to find out what happens next. It's an impressive debut novel. 4.5/5 stars
The author bio:
Patmeena Sabit was born in Kabul a few years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When she was a month old, her family fled the conflict and became refugees in Pakistan, joining the millions of other Afghans that had sought refuge there. They later moved to the United States and she grew up in Virginia. She currently lives in Toronto.
Lines of note:
Early in the afternoon it started to snow, flakes as big as my hand...(location 356)
I'm immediately suspicious of this person. Flakes might be as big as a dime, but not as a whole hand. This narrator is obviously prone to exagerration.
...think they understood then that you can never know even your own children completely, that all the love and time and effort and wanting in the world doesn’t guarantee they’ll always do right and stay on the right path. (location 1262)
AND
When a child goes bad, the whole world holds a finger to the mother and father. But how can you know? Look how many children born into pure evil grow to walk as angels among men. And look how some of the best mothers and fathers come to raise the devil’s own seed. (location 1482)
We're having an issue in our family and there's a lot of questioning of the parenting and it's really hard. Maybe it is the parenting? Or maybe it would have happened no matter what? It's hard and it's hard to know how best to support everyone in the situation.
You know, we actually care about each other around here. It’s not like New York or Chicago or any of those big places where some poor soul dies all alone in their apartment and no one knows until six months later when the landlord breaks down the door and finds a skeleton sitting on the sofa watching The Price Is Right. (location 2756)
Just another opportunity for me to plug The Lonely Life of George Bell.
We put a little bottle of water next to his bed every night, but in the summer he won’t drink anything but cold water straight from the fridge. He calls it fresh water. (location 2933)
I do this same thing. I also call if fresh water. I do not like to be reflected in an eight-year-old child.
...I’ve woken in the middle of the night a hundred times and gone downstairs and thought the coatrack near the door was a robber. (location 4018)
Who hasn't?
Things I looked up:
cecropia moth (location 851) - North America's largest native moth; females have been documented with a wingspan of five to seven inches or more
lorikeets (location 853) - small-to-medium-sized parrots known for their bright, multicolored plumage and specialized brush-tipped tongues used to feed on nectar, pollen, and fruit. Native to Australia and surrounding regions, they are highly social, noisy birds that often form loud flocks and live for 10 - 20+ years
Hat mentions (why hats?):
I remember it was taking us a long time to get through a reading comprehension exercise because her little brother and sister had found some party hats and horns somewhere and they kept running in and screaming “Happy New Year!” and blowing them in our faces and running off again. (location 1079)
Our girls went shopping at the T.J. Maxx or Marshalls or JCPenney and threw their hats to the sky when they could do even that. (location 1516)
The rest of us would try on the old-lady hats and fur coats. (location 1748)
Well, he must have known that his hat had fallen into oil from the second she turned her hot eyes on him. (location 2036)
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I sort of wish I had listened to this on audio since I feel like hearing the different voices would have been helpful. Have you ever listened to an epistolary novel? Do you like it?
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