Book Review: The Sweetness of Tears by Nafisa Haji

Teaser Tuesdays asks you to choose sentences at random from your current read. Identify the author and title for readers.

"When people cry for each other, it is a good thing. Always remember that and never try to suppress the tears that flow from the love in your heart.... That is the secret we were born to learn. The secret of the sweetness of tears." (ch. 2)

Title: The Sweetness of Tears: A Novel by Nafisa Haji
400 pages. William Morrow Paperbacks; Original edition (May 17, 2011)
Source: review copy from publisher.
Objective rating: 4/5

Product description: The Sweetness of Tears is a story of forbidden love and a family story that interweaves multiple generations and cultural viewpoints.

When faith and facts collide, Jo March—a young woman born into an Evangelical Christian dynasty—wrestles with questions about who she is and how she fits into the weave of her faithful family. Chasing loose threads that she hopes will lead to the truth, Jo sets off on an unlikely quest across boundaries of language and religion, through chasms of sectarian divides in the Muslim world. Against the backdrop of the War on Terror—travelling from California to Chicago, Pakistan to Iraq—she delves deeply into the past, encountering relatives, often for the first time, whose histories are intricately intertwined with her own . . . only to learn that true spiritual devotion is a broken field riddled with doubt and that nothing is ever as it seems.
 
My comments: I like that the story is told from several different perspectives by people from different generations:  Jo, Sadiq and Angela, Deena, and Faith. Jo's doubts about herself begin when, as a student learning biology, she realizes that the blue color of both her parents' eyes mean that her eyes should also be blue.  But her eyes are brown. Her mother's confession leads Jo on a mental and emotional journey to find out the truth about her parentage.

I believe the book is an attempt to show how East and West can connect in a positive way, how different cultures and people can live together in harmony and co-exist in peace. Jo is the symbol of this co-existence.

About the author: Nafisa Haji is the author of The Writing on My Forehead, which was a finalist for the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award. She is a Californian of Indo-Pakistani descent, born and raised in Los Angeles. Her website is http://www.nafisahaji.com/

Nafisa Haji, author of The Writing on My Forehead

Nafisa Haji, author of The Writing on My Forehead, was born in Los Angeles to parents from India and Pakistan. She traveled to many different countries while growing up, studied history at Berkeley, and received a doctorate in education from UCLA. That's impressive. Rather than becoming a career academic, she taught Spanish in elementary school, and wrote. What she says about her journey to becoming a fulltime writer, using the stories and fables she heard as a child, tells us a lot about why and how we write.

Nafisa: "The truth is, I have always wanted to write because of how much I love to read. And now that I am lucky enough to be able to write fulltime (still have to pinch myself to believe it!), I realize that one of the best kept secrets about writing fulltime is having the luxury to read fulltime.

I am an eclectic reader, which is just a fancy way of saying that I like to read everything—from classics to pulp, from cereal boxes to sci-fi (related because sometimes it seems you need a degree in chemistry to be able to understand food labels, doesn’t it?) I spent my childhood traveling through time and space, backwards and forwards and ‘round the world, admiring the minds of the people who created the worlds and lives I loved to lose myself in. So, naturally, I wanted to be like those people, those storytellers who were my heroes. Who doesn’t want to grow up and be like their hero?

When I grew up, I also had to earn a living. Lucky for me, I loved what I did, which was teaching in elementary school—an all-absorbing vocation that left little energy for me to write. I always planned to pick up writing the novel(s) I’d left unfinished when I became a mom, when I planned to stay at home. Of course, in hindsight, that was a hilarious plan, because “momming” is no less absorbing than teaching. But I learned to squeeze words out during nap times and on weekends.

Picking up unfinished novels from the past turned out to be a no-go. I’d outgrown everything I’d written before—that’s a terrible risk of leaving things unfinished and I had to mourn those losses before wading back in with dry feet. I started with short stories. Family stories—fables, like the kind I grew up hearing from my mother, about all the pitfalls that bad behavior could ultimately lead to. Then, I found a voice to challenge those fables. A voice that asked questions about the angles of stories that get deliberately left out of maternal fables, are spun to keep little ones in line. That voice was Saira’s, the protagonist and voice of The Writing On My Forehead, who realizes that we are shaped as much, if not more, by the secrets we don’t share, as we are by the official, sterile record of history that gets written into “school” books.

Seven years later—most of them spent rewriting and revising, I got published—amassing a fair collection of rejection letters along the way that I have learned to treasure as gifts, all of them helping to improve the book as well as my skills as a writer."

You can learn more about the author at Nafisa Haji's website

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Book Review/Tour: The Writing on My Forehead by Nafisa Haji

The Writing on My Forehead by Nafisa Haji is an excellent novel about family ties and a woman's role in a traditional culture.null

The novel reads like a memoir but is actually a fictional account of a girl growing up in the United States who must also conform to the Indo-Pakistani traditions of her immigrant parents.

My comments: I was struck by the universal themes of family life and family ties in this novel, the almost common kinds of problems faced by children and parents in the nuclear and the extended family. There is jealousy and rivalry as well as affection between sisters, and secrets that keep family members together and apart. In this case, the family of Saira Qader extends from the U.S. to India, to Pakistan, and to London, all of which she visits at different times to meet with various family members.

What is unique about the novel and the story is how Saira rejects as well as conforms to her own family and cultural traditions, with conflicts and victories in love and loyalty. I highly recommend this book for its look at a modern Western woman who also belongs to a rich but challenging traditional culture. Haji is a gifted writer whose characters are engaging and whose storytelling is truly compelling.

This review is part of a virtual book tour hosted by TLC Book Tours. Visit them for a list of other stops on the tour. A copy of the book was provided free for my objective review.

Challenges: 100 + Reading Challenge, Book Review Party Wednesday

Two New Books for March

The Writing on My Forehead: A Novel and The Solitude of Prime Numbers,
are two new books I promised to review for March, one for a tour on the 22nd and the other to meet the release date on the 18th.

The Writing on My Forehead is the story of Saira Qader, an American journalist of  Indo-Pakistani descent who discovers, with some emotion, the stories of her grandparents, aunt, and her parents - three generations of a Muslim family. The book, her first, is by Nafisa Haji, a writer who lives in California. Published by Harper Perennial in 2009.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers, a debut novel by Paolo Giordano, tells the story of two lonely teens, Alice and Mattia, who are damaged by childlhood tragedies, but feel a kindred spirit when they first meet. They are later separated by circumstances and reunited in adulthood by chance. Can these two "prime numbers" fit together or are they destined to remain separate?

The novel was first published in 2008 in Giordano's  native Italy. The English version will be released March 18.

Looking forward to reading both novels, and to a guest post by Nafisa Haji!