...absolutely gorgeous ... Mirza writes about family life with the wisdom, insight and patience you would expect from a mature novelist adding a final masterpiece to her canon, but this is, fortunately, just the start of an extraordinary career ... Has a household ever been cradled in such tender attention as this novel provides? Possibly, but in a different register. As Marilynne Robinson has done with Protestants and Alice McDermott has done with Catholics, Mirza finds in the intensity of a faithful Muslim family a universal language of love and anguish that speaks to us all ... 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.
Mirza's book gets to a universal truth: To be part of a family is to learn how to be more than one person, how to remain an individual while fulfilling the duties we have to those who love us, who made us ... A Place for Us is a stunning novel about love, compassion, cruelty and forgiveness—the very things that make families what they are ... The structure of A Place for Us is unconventional; the novel goes back and forth in time, switching points of view. This isn't the easiest thing to pull off, but Mirza executes it perfectly, creating a constant tension in the narrative that keeps readers turning the pages, but is never cheap or exploitative. And her writing is gorgeous, unadorned but beautiful ... Mirza, 27, writes with more grace and self-confidence than many authors who have been publishing before she was born, and it's going to be fascinating to see what she does next.
Immigrant novels often center on conflict and the juxtaposition between Old World values and modern Western culture. In seeking a better life for their children, Layla and Rafiq must contend with this and the effect it has on their family. A Place for Us resonates at the crossroads of culture, character, storytelling and poignancy.
Mirza’s debut novel, extraordinary in its depth and diligence ... adeptly revisits painful dilemmas from each narrator’s perspective, revealing jolting secrets. Each complex, surprising character struggles with faith, responsibility, racism, fear, longing, and jealousy, while Mirza conveys with graceful specificity the rhythms of Muslim life, from prayer to wearing hijab, gender etiquette, food, holidays, and values, all of which illuminate universal quandaries about family, self, culture, beliefs, and generational change.
This novel, the first by 27-year-old California writer Fatima Farheen Mirza, is a stunner, worthy of a place among the finest books ever written about an American family ... A Place for Us is a remarkable, beautiful and timely story, well deserving of the rave reviews it’s getting from every corner.
The narrative functions very much like memory, and we travel between significant moments, often returning to them with new details and a deeper understanding. Mirza’s strongest point as an author is her ability to reveal the heart, the pain, and the suffering in the simple day-to-day experiences of family life ... The relationship between these two characters [Amar and Amira] is deftly written, capturing both the catastrophic magnitude of their young love and the terror of that prohibited connection, as the two do not have permission to speak to one another, let alone pursue a romantic relationship ... And Mirza does an excellent job of fully sketching out the nuances of...parental failures ... What slows down Mirza’s narrative, for the first three quarters of the book, is a pedantic listing of cultural markers. Mirza often muddies the story by becoming tour guide rather than storyteller ... these digressions only hamper her talent and impede her ability to tell the story that matters.
There is the more conspicuous story about Rafiq and Layla—a Muslim-Indian immigrant couple in California—and their children ... But woven throughout this arc is a micro-narrative of a young man coming of age within that family and struggling to find his own 'place' within it ... The result is a family epic that is textured and keenly felt, if at times meandering ... Mirza’s chosen structure...distracted from the otherwise convincing pathos of her characters’ emotional and moral plights. Indeed these plights and the themes they belie are often just as varied and frenetically sketched as the novel’s architecture. If Amar’s alienation can be identified as the book’s central tension (and given all the competing tensions, I am not 100 percent sure that it can), then the reasons behind it, the context that made it so, are muddied by the way Mirza eschews traditional plot development ... For all the novel’s deliberate disorder, however ... Mirza draws Amar’s lifelong struggle with the concept of unconditional devotion so poignantly that readers will find it exceedingly relatable.
... an affecting, authentic and artful debut ... By the end of the novel, readers may wish that some characters had spoken up at critical junctures and that other characters had swallowed the words that irreparably altered the course of events. That we become so invested is a testament to Mirza's talent.
The events of 9/11, the temptations of drugs and alcohol, the pressure for academic achievement, and the traditions of arranged marriage all play a role ... Unfortunately, as the story rolls back and forth through the chronology and the perspectives of the different family members, the conflicts are rehashed too many times and at too much length ... The author's passion for her subject shines like the moon in the night sky, a recurrent image in this ardent and powerful novel.
Bonds of faith and family strengthen and strangle in this promising but flawed debut ... The plot then shuffles backward and forward, revisiting plot points with few signposts to let the reader know when exactly key events ... Mirza displays a particular talent for rendering her characters’ innermost emotional lives, signaling a writer to watch.
