How are you supposed to live in a world where so many people hate women? When Greer Kadetsky is groped at a frat party her freshman year, that is the question she begins to ask, and which animates Meg Wolitzer's wonderful novel. The characters in it ultimately answer these questions in different ways, but they all come to at least one conclusion: You have to do something, even if it's just, as one character says, managing to "live your life and be yourself with all your values intact."When you read it, you wonder if Faith is fashioned after one of our feminist "icons?" It's not important though. What the book says IS important!
...but it is really a deeply subtle book about privilege: how clueless, apparently decent guys can float through life unaware of the injustices around them, sometimes even ones they have committed.I think I need to read more Tana French books!
...this is a novel about how families create their own history and mythology — and how those assumptions about the past haunt their relations with each other.There is so much going on in this family, and between the different family members. I just loved the characters....and in the end, the father, who is not so sympathetic earlier in the book, reveals himself to be a much different person than he tries to project to the world.
Part of what makes Mirza’s novel captivating is her ability to shift among perspectives so gracefully. We feel the panic of Amar’s parents as they struggle to find some effective balance between discipline and indulgence. And we feel the torment of Amar’s conviction that he doesn’t belong, that he’s not right, that he doesn’t deserve the blessing of salvation and, finally, that he’s not a Muslim. Yet the real agony, which Mirza plumbs with such heartbreaking sympathy, is Amar’s incurable longing for the balm of belief and the embrace of his devout parents.Highly recommended!
In prose of quiet beauty and measured restraint, Mirza traces those twined strands of yearning and sorrow that faith involves. She writes with a mercy that encompasses all things. If the demands of Islam make Rafiq behave cruelly toward his only son, those same demands eventually inspire a confession of affection that is among the most poignant things I have ever read. Each time I stole away into this novel, it felt like a privilege to dwell among these people, to fall back under the gentle light of Mirza’s words.
The debut novel of an astonishing voice in psychological suspense. As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours. Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a twelve-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox—his partner and closest friend—find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery. Now, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past. Richly atmospheric, stunning in its complexity, and utterly convincing and surprising to the end.
