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Summary
Summary
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD * "This exquisite debut wrestles with gender, siblinghood, family, and what it means to be Muslim in America--all through the lens of love."-- Time
"Haunting . . . a knife-sharp story of self-discovery."-- People
WINNER OF THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Time, Vox, PopSugar, Autostraddle
In this heartrending, lyrical debut work of fiction, the acclaimed author of If They Come for Us traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another. The youngest, Kausar, grapples with the incomprehensible loss of their parents as she also charts out her own understanding of gender; Aisha, the middle sister, spars with her "crybaby" younger sibling as she desperately tries to hold on to her sense of family in an impossible situation; and Noreen, the eldest, does her best in the role of sister-mother while also trying to create a life for herself, on her own terms.
As Kausar grows up, she must contend with the collision of her private and public worlds, and choose whether to remain in the life of love, sorrow, and codependency that she's known or carve out a new path for herself. When We Were Sisters tenderly examines the bonds and fractures of sisterhood, names the perils of being three Muslim American girls alone against the world, and ultimately illustrates how those who've lost everything might still make homes in one another.
LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE AND THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Asghar follows the poetry collection If They Come for Us with her elegant debut novel, which follows three Pakistani American sisters scrabbling to get by after their father dies. Nine-year-old Noreen, the oldest and de facto caretaker; Aisha, the quarrelsome middle child; and Kausar, the sensitive youngest, are taken in by an estranged relative, referred to only as "Uncle," who promises them a home with a zoo. It soon becomes apparent that he has taken custody only to cash the checks that the government pays him to care for the sisters (the "zoo" turns out to be a hallway of mistreated pets), and he rules the sisters' lives with authoritarian neglect, demanding they follow a strict schedule even while he leaves them unsupervised for long stretches of time. The sisters must learn to grapple with their grief while caring for each other and establishing their own identities. Asghar's poetic sensibilities are on full display in the lyrical and oblique prose ("Brown fingers cradle porcelain, the news spreading fast and careless as a common cold"), and the frequent formal experimentation enlivens the text (for example, one page reads in its entirety: "A bunk bed in exchange for a father./ What idiots. He was our father. We should have asked for more"). The result is a creative telling of a tender coming-of-age tale. (Oct.)
Guardian Review
Kausar is the youngest of the three orphaned sisters in Fatimah Asghar's grief-soaked and gorgeous debut novel. When she walks past Bobby and his friends in the school cafeteria, she overhears him say: "That's my heart right there." With flushed cheeks, she races to the bathroom. She stares and stares into the mirror, but alas "can't find another heart to give". Adrift in the world without a mother or father, her heart is a little bit Noreen's, a little bit Aisha's. Her two sisters are all she has - even if the distance between them is growing. Kausar "put her heart inside [her sisters'] hearts" long ago, long before they became orphans. She was "born this way, belonging to them, trying to follow their breath". The day their father dies, murdered on the streets of America at the opening of the novel, their home turns into a "House of Sadness". His body is sent from Pennsylvania to Lahore and buried in soil they can't touch, in a "place he is from, and so we are from, but we know nothing about". A VHS tape of his burial is sent to their house - the girls watch it on repeat surrounded by aunties. The sisters had innocently wished for new bunk beds - and lost their father while he was out buying them. Asghar places these sentences on the verso and recto pages of this section: "A bunk bed in exchange for a father" and "What idiots. He was our father. We should have asked for more." Uncle, whose name is replaced throughout with a black box, becomes the sisters' guardian, but mostly to serve his own interests (the redaction speaks to his dereliction of familial duty - he takes their inheritance and the government-issue cheques). He transports them to a new city, a new house. In the years that follow, they come of age and fall apart; each attempts to confront their changing selves and the system as Muslim American women. They form makeshift families, forging bonds with the immigrants their money-minded uncle rents rooms to. The girls don't remember their "phantom mother" - she's a myth, a make-believe, who died when they were still babies. Their father is gradually becoming make-believe too. They play games of "once-upon-a-time", nostalgic for the good old days. Everywhere they go, they carry the fog of familial grief. A poet first, Asghar picks up on the themes of her debut collection If They Come for Us - partition and fragmentation, borders and bodies - and plays with space and silence on the page. Narrated by Kausar in vignettes, often in staccato sentences, and interspersed with poetic flashbacks from the perspective of the father and mother, this fragmentary form has the effect of ephemerality - much like life. "A word is a word is a word," she writes, but "is a sister still a sister when a mother dies?" Time is warped. The duties of father, mother, sister, sibling are blurred. "What no one will understand is that the world belongs to orphans, everything becomes our mother," writes Asghar. "We're mothered by everything because we know how to look for the mothering, because we know a mother might leave us and we'll need another mother to step in and take its place." The sisters search for parental figures but are often left grasping. The world may be theirs, but they feel stripped of a sense of belonging. Asghar's melodic and melancholy work is reminiscent of other novels written by poets - Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Safia Elhillo's Home Is Not a Country - but perhaps sits closest to Akhil Sharma's 2014 novel, Family Life, in its distilled and lucid rendering of loss. She is not afraid to wear her heart on her sleeve - there is no stripping back of emotion. When We Were Sisters is not easy reading. Grief is not an easy feeling; it is lonely, slippery, elusive. But Kausar can look to Noreen and Aisha, to her sister-mothers, and know: that's my heart right there. For a few moments the fog lifts, the heart is no longer heavy. That knowledge will do.
Kirkus Review
Sisterhood is the power that gets three young Muslim American girls through a neglected childhood in this debut novel. Their mother died years ago; when their beloved father is murdered, young sisters Noreen, Aisha, and Kausar are orphaned. Their parents were immigrants from Pakistan, so they are "familyless in America" except for one uncle, their mother's brother, whom they don't know. Noreen, the oldest sister, is smart, pretty, and responsible; Aisha is assertive and angry. Kausar, the book's narrator, is the youngest. She's frightened and confused, but she worships her sisters fiercely. The girls are taken in by the man Kausar calls Uncle, the term always followed by a black bar, as if his name were redacted in an official document. He picks them up in Philadelphia and takes them to a city a "five-hour car ride" away. He promises them a new home with plenty of room and a zoo; what they get is a cramped apartment with a hallway full of caged birds and three bedrooms, to one of which all of them are confined. Uncle gives them strict rules of behavior and isolates them from everything but school. He's dealing with his own problems--he's separated from his American wife (who wants nothing to do with his nieces) and two sons, whom he maintains in suburban splendor. He lives in his own apartment near the girls, where his hoarding is out of control. So he often neglects his nieces, leaving them without food or money. He rents out the other bedrooms in their apartment to immigrants in transit, and sometimes the sisters get lucky, as with a kindly couple who parent them for a while. But much of the time they are on their own. Caught between American culture and their family's Pakistani background with little guidance, the girls turn to each other for support. But as they grow up and become teenagers, cracks develop in their bonds of love. Kausar's compelling voice, sometimes lyrical, sometimes heartbreaking, is skillfully crafted, changing subtly as she grows. The book's ending, a jump forward in time, seems tacked on and less convincing than what went before, but the sisters' story is a moving journey. An assured first novel explores the bonds and divides among three orphaned sisters. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
When their father is brutally murdered in Pennsylvania, three Muslim American sisters are left with nothing but a new title: orphans. Taken in by a peculiar uncle with harsh rules, the young girls are confined to a tiny bedroom in an apartment filled with birds, turtles, and other animals. Under the watchful eye of the moon, they learn to depend on each other in an ever-changing landscape of caretakers, abuse, and grief. But as they enter their teen years, their diverging paths--alongside their uncle's growing control and society's harsh gender roles--begin to test the bonds of their sisterhood. Author Asghar brings that same lyricism from her poetry collection, If They Come for Us (2018), crafting vignettes with dark but tender prose that form a striking picture of the sisters' daily lives. With minimal dialogue, these brief windows are told through the first-person observations of the youngest, Kausar, with occasional interludes from their uncle or father. A debut in fiction perfect for poetry readers, this poignant coming-of-age tale examines a girlhood torn apart by loss.
Library Journal Review
Pakistani-Kashmiri American poet Asghar's (If They Come for Us) debut novel follows three Pakistani American sisters through a bleak childhood marked by grief and neglect. Noreen, Aisha, and Kausar lost their mother years ago; now, after their father's sudden death, they are orphaned. They are taken in by their corrupt uncle, who stows them in a shoddy apartment filled with turtles, birds, and other animals. He lives elsewhere but keeps the girls in this desperate limbo as he draws on their inheritance. Hungry and unsupported, the girls grow into adults, struggling to do right by each other and themselves. Farah Kidwai, Kamran Khan, and Deepti Gupta narrate, with Kidwai taking the lead and telling the story through Kausar's eyes. Khan gives voice to the girls' father ("Him"), and Gupta provides a brief, but graceful appearance as their mother ("Her"). While Kidwai skillfully captures the lyricism of Asghar's words, listeners may be disoriented by experimental parts of the book that don't translate well into audio, including pages with the text written vertically and sentences separated by large gaps. VERDICT Asghar's poignant debut shines with moments of piercing beauty despite the heaviness that governs the sisters' lives. A tough but gorgeous listen.--Sarah Hashimoto