I don’t read a lot of fiction with religion at its core, but Search by Michelle Huneven was recommended to me after a spate of heavy, challenging nonfiction. I knew nothing about the story, but was initially apprehensive about the premise of a woman joining the search committee for a new minister at her church. Thankfully, Huneven writes the realities of what happens when eight ... Read More...
The Book of Everlasting Things
The Book of Everlasting Things is a multigenerational debut spanning the globe from India to Europe. Initially set in Lahore, India in the 1930s and 40s the novel encompasses 70 years in the lives of one Hindu boy and one Muslim girl. Two children, who despite different backgrounds, grow into love only to have it, and their lives, shattered when Great Britain partitions part of ... Read More...
God Spare the Girls
What do you do when your entire family is perfect, but you’re 18 and confused? For Caroline Nolan, in God Spare the Girls, it’s an especially complicated question because her father is Luke Nolan, pastor of a megachurch in Texas. Her mother Ruthie is the perfect matriarch, calm and always perfectly coiffed. Worst of all, is her older sister Abigail, her father’s favorite for ... Read More...
The Bad Muslim Discount
The blurb for The Bad Muslim Discount calls it “hilarious” so I was ready for some kind of satirical, light, comedic look at Muslim culture in America told from the Middle Eastern perspective. I was deliciously mistaken in that what I got was a thoughtful, nuanced portrayal of two immigrants, one from Pakistan and one from Iraq whose lives unexpectedly intersect. Was it the ... Read More...
Mothers’ Week: A Woman is No Man
It’s easy to become outraged about the treatment of women in the Muslim world when it takes place far away, as in the memoir Daring to Drive or fiction like Song of a Captive Bird or The Pearl that Broke its Shell. It’s ingrained through centuries of custom and dogma, but debut author Etaf Rum shreds any sense of complacency about American values superseding cultural ones in ... Read More...
Women Talking: A Novel by Miriam Toews
In the Mennonite community of Molotschna eight women gather in a barn to talk. Their meeting is a secret, made possible only because the men have gone into the city to bail out eight men who have been accused of a heinous crime: that of drugging and raping over 100 of the community’s women and girls repeatedly over a two-year span. It will take two days for the men to return ... Read More...
