The first 6 pages of When We Were Sisters do not invite the reader in. These pages are written from the distant point of view of an uncaring universe. We learn that an unnamed man has been murdered in an unnamed city—not the one he was born in, but where his children were born. We learn that upon his death, the man’s brother-in-law, who married a white American woman, “celebrates” by renovating his house. We learn that the murdered man’s wife has also died, leaving the orphaned nieces with “their dead dad’s money up for grabs.” The brother-in-law’s white wife refuses to take in the orphans, so the man promises, “It’ll be like they never existed.” The reader struggles to understand and to care about these people.

From this distant beginning, the novel plunges us into a very personal, first-person story from the point of view of a little girl with two older sisters. We gather that these girls are the orphans, and that their father has been murdered. Because the novel starts from the point of view of the little girl, the situation is confusing to the reader, as it was to little Kausar. An uncle takes them to an apartment he owns, which they must share with many caged birds and other animals. Gradually, we learn that the uncle, whose name is blacked out throughout the novel, is using their father’s money, as well as the government checks that each girl receives, while keeping them isolated and in poverty, sometimes without even money for food. The uncle eventually rents another room of the apartment to a couple newly arrived from Pakistan. This couple begins to take care of the girls, acting as parent figures. However, when the uncle finds out about the bond between this couple and the girls, he evicts the couple. The girls must grow up on their own.

Most parts of the novel are in prose. However, Fatimah Asghar, who is also a poet, has also included several poems, as well as a few experimental sections. One passage, printed sideways, has many words missing, with the missing words printed on the facing page. Although I don’t normally enjoy experimental novels, in this case I was drawn in by Kausar’s intensely emotional story. The piecemeal way the story is told reflects Kausar’s fragmented view of life.

This novel is somewhat different from many of the other second-generation novels I’ve reviewed. Kausar does deal with the usual questions about where she is from. At one point, she is called “Pocahontas” (p. 106). However, her suffering and struggles as an orphan and as a survivor of abuse overshadow her attempts to navigate her Pakistani heritage and her American reality.

I was curious about whether the story was based on the author’s life. In an interview, Asghar said that, like Kausar, she is an orphan with two sisters. She says the book has “auto-fictional elements.” I highly recommend this novel. Stick with it past the difficult first pages, and I think you will be as absorbed as I was in this deeply moving story.

I’m so glad to finally discover the author Bich Minh Nguyen. I believe her name is pronounced Bik Min Ngwen. A refugee from Vietnam, she grew up in Michigan. I was interested to read her novel Pioneer Girl because, like the main character Lee Lien, I was also obsessed with the Little House books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane.

Lee, home after earning a PhD in American literature but failing to land a job, discovers a brooch that a journalist named Rose left at her grandfather’s Saigon café during the Vietnam war. The brooch looks remarkably like a brooch that Laura Ingalls Wilder owned and described in one of her books. Lee wonders—could this brooch have belonged to the real Rose Wilder Lane, who was indeed a journalist in Saigon during the Vietnam War? Lee sets off on a wild goose chase to figure out the answer, and also to escape the critical eye of her mother.

I got the sense that one reason for Lee’s obsession with Laura and Rose is to find a connection between her murky past (she knows very little about her ancestors’ lives in Vietnam) and a quintessential American figure. Lee asks herself, “How many times during the years of my Little House obsession had I pretended the pin was Laura’s secret gift to me?” (p. 46).  Later in the book she admits that she was “searching for, maybe hoping for, my own claim on America’s favorite pioneer family” (p. 81).

Interestingly, at the time I was reading this novel, I came across some photos of myself at the age of eleven, dressed in a long, frilly “pioneer” type dress that my mother had made for me. I loved that dress. In fact, the dress was the basis of a skit that I wrote and that my best friend and I performed on her back patio for Mother’s Day. We rounded up as many neighborhood mothers as we could to watch the skit. I don’t remember how many actually showed up, but my mother must have been there to take the photos. The skit involved two pioneer girls who were grumpy about all the housework they had to do, and decided to run away.

I saw nothing unusual in the fact that I was an Indian American girl pretending to be a pioneer American settler. At that time, I didn’t really know what to make of my Indian heritage. I didn’t even know the phrase “Indian American,” and I’d never read anything about Indian Americans. Pretending I was a pioneer girl was like borrowing someone else’s heritage for my own. I think I longed for the close multi-generational family of the Little House in the Big Woods book, a family in which parents, children, and community share the same culture, values, and expectations. I didn’t realize until I was an adult that the idyllic childhood portrayed in those books was a fiction. Laura’s real life was much harder and more tragic than the books reveal. In addition, as a child I only vaguely picked up on the racism that made it acceptable for a white family to displace indigenous American Indian families.

The “pioneer girl” in Nguyen’s title could refer to Laura, to Rose (who was a pioneering woman journalist), or to the main character Lee, the first in her family to earn an American PhD. The novel is written in the first person and the style is so natural that one might mistake it for memoir. The characters of Lee, her older brother Sam, her mother, and her grandfather come across as unique, real people. The dialogue flows effortlessly, and interesting bits of backstory are woven in seamlessly. I was kept engaged by the several mysteries that Lee tries to untangle over the course of the novel.

 I’m looking forward to reading more by Bich Minh Nguyen. She is also the author of the memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and the novel Short Girls.

Home Fire does not fit exactly into the premise of this site, because the novel is about second-generation Pakistani-British people, rather than second-generation Americans (which is my focus on this site). But I decided to review it because it speaks to important issues that are similar to both cultures. I can imagine Muslim-Americans going through similar difficulties as the characters in this novel.

Home Fire, which won the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction, is told from the points of view of five different Pakistani-British characters. The jacket flap copy is misleading, because it gives the impression that this book is mainly about Isma, a Londoner who is starting graduate school in the U.S.  While Isma is indeed one of the main characters, her section (a somewhat boring section, in my opinion) serves to introduce the other characters and the main conflict, which involves her brother, Parvaiz, a misguided young man who has been fooled into traveling to Syria and joining a terrorist group, and Parvaiz’s twin sister Aneeka’s quest to allow him to return to Britain once he manages to escape from this group. The novel is based on the Greek tragedy Antigone. Even the names are similiar: Isma is the counterpart to Ismene; Aneeka is Antigone; Parvaiz is Polyneices; Eamonn is Haemon; and Karamat is King Creon. You don’t need to have read Antigone to appreciate this novel, but the parallels are interesting.

Like Antigone, Aneeka flouts the law of the land (laid down by British Home Secretary Karamat) that those who join terrorist groups abroad can never return to British soil. Isma, like Ismene, is inclined to want to obey the law, but also supports her sister. Antigone the play is very short, and we know almost nothing about the brother. In Home Fire, we get a whole section about Parvaiz, giving insight into his decision to travel to Syria, and detailing his disillusionment and efforts to return to Britain. In the play, we know almost nothing about the love between Antigone and Creon’s son Haemon, but in the novel Home Fire, the love affair of Aneeka and Eamonn (Karamat’s son) is well developed.

Home Fire asks the questions: what is home? Who is allowed to become a citizen and remain a citizen, and under what reason? An interesting twist is that Karamat, the Pakistani-British Home Secretary, bends over backwards to disavow fellow Muslims who look and act in ways that show their differences from mainstream British people.

Once you get past Isma’s tepid first section, this is a gripping, thought-provoking, and important work.