At the start of the
summer, Anwar is happy. He moved his family from Bangladesh to
Brooklyn and has created a good life for his wife and two daughters.
He owns an apothecary shop where he sells beauty treatments and
salves that he makes himself. He has a home he renovated in Brooklyn
that he enjoys. He loves his family and is proud of his daughters,
Ella and Charu. Then changes begin.
He loves his wife,
but their romance has grown stale. He remedies it with an affair that
he regrets. The girls too are changing. Ella comes home
from college to discover Maya, a Moslem cleric's daughter, staying
with them. The girls become very close blurring the lines between
love and friendship.
Maya tries to poison
herself, and Anwar's family experiences terror in their own
neighborhood. To escape the problems, Anwar takes his family to
Bangladesh. They enjoy being back among family, but tragedy stalks
them.
If you enjoy
character driven novels, this is a good one. Each of the family
members is carefully crafted. During the summer they all grow and
change in believable ways. The girls experience the pains of growing
up and coming to terms with who they are. Anwar also must face who he
is and come to terms with the horrors of the past in Bangladesh.
The settings in
Brooklyn and Bangladesh are beautifully described. I particularly
enjoyed the description of Anwar's garden that he and Ella loved.
I highly recommend
this book. It brings the reader into a different life and describes
it beautifully.
I reviewed this book
for Net Galley.
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