A Place for Us: A Novel

First 5⭐️ read of 2019! I finished A Place For Us last weekend, but I’ve been struggling to get my thoughts together to write a (semi)coherent review. I bought this book after seeing the author speak at the Boston Book Festival back in October and I didn’t really know what to expect going in. And even still, this book exceeded any possible expectations I might have had. Everything about this book was just so well done, so beautifully crafted and thought-provoking
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A Place For Us tells the story of an Indian-American Muslim family that is reuniting for the first time when the son, Amar, returns home for his sister’s wedding after three years away. Focusing on themes of family, religion, identity, and belonging, the story goes back and forth between various points in time to examine how different events shaped their family. What I loved most about this book, other than the beautiful writing style, was the way the book alternates between each of the different family members POVs at various points in their lives. Because of this, each and every character was so complex and well-developed. The different stories were so intricately woven together and the way the author showed the same event from different perspectives made it nearly impossible to root for or point fingers at any one character. The book really made me think about the way different moments, even seemingly insignificant ones, can shape a person’s life. And the ending, my god 😭 You guys warned me it would be sad, but I was not prepared lol. It was a slower read, but one that came together so beautifully in the end — Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

This is a beautiful, sensitive insight into Indian-Muslim culture as it co-exists alongside life in the United States. The story is told from multiple perspectives and jumps around in time a fair bit. This is not my favourite format, but I recognise the structural advantages to revealing different parts of the plot at certain times. I was interested to read this because Fatima Farheen Mitza is married to Riz Ahmed who I recently heard interviewed by Louis Theroux on his podcast "Grounded" and then enjoyed watching him in the 2019 movie "Sound of Metal". His British-Pakistani background, political views and cultural observations made me curious to learn more. A Place for Us certainly offers this opportunity. Fatima makes regular use of Urdu and Islamic words as she tells her story, and italicizes them which I thought worked well. As a non-Muslim reader, I would have appreciated a glossary to help me with these, but Googling them was fine too and many of them could be guessed/understood through context. Just a warning to other readers: as a parent I found the second half of this novel very thought-provoking, emotional and intense.

Book 16: I'm convinced that Reese Witherspoon's book recommendations are really for white people who live in a white bubble. So this book was okay. I was just annoyed at how charming and funny the brother was supposed to be, but we were only told this. We never saw it in action. Frankly, I want people in books to exist outside of their traumas sometimes. The rest of us do. Anyway, this was another dysfunctional family novel (Nothing against them. I'm writing one myself.) It didn't stand out as a fantastic dysfunctional family novel, like the Ice Storm or Family Fang, but it was alright. The thing that got it on Witherspoon's list and all the press is that the family is Muslim. People raved about this book giving them insight into what it's like to be part of a religious Muslim family. Spoiler: It's like any other religious family. We don't really get any insight on the religion, but it does let us know children in Muslim families are dealing with similar pressures of those as any other kids in religious families. Maybe that's insight for people who thought that being Muslim is drastically different from being anything else in the U.S. That's what I mean by the white bubble comment earlier. I'm feeling a little uppity right now. Books exist for people to learn about others, so I shouldn't poo-poo the value of the insights that people got from this book. Which was alright as a book.