Besides being the first book I have ever read by a Pakistani writer and having the subject matter be something so close to my everyday experiences, this book just didn't do it for me. As much as I wanted to like Saira, the supposedly spunky heroine of the novel, I couldn't get past her almost inauthentic voice. To be fair, the poor choices in regards to perspective and point of view made by the author is mostly to blame for that. The story starts in present tense, with Saira in her sister's house, looking over her niece while she sleeps and recalling, through vivid flashbacks, the details of her life up until that moment. And that is how the majority of the book is presented: in flashback...through the eyes of a grown-up Saira remembering things that adolescent Saira went through. The writing did not pull this ambitious perspective off. Saira didn't have much of a voice, and even if she had, the book wasn't JUST her experiences anyway. It told the story of her grandmother, grandfathers, grand mother's sister, etc. etc. These stories were ALSO in the form of flashbacks that were told to Saira through long-winded monologues by characters within Saira's own flashbacks. So...flashbacks within flashbacks? And although these stories were meant to be told in different perspectives by different people, they were usually in the same vein: fables and fairy tales with strong underlying moral messages usually accompanied by an oral essay of the narrator's beliefs. So not only is the real meat of the book being told by an outside perspective--in the most unimaginative way--but it also gets diluted by Saira's own lens of bias. The ending result being a story told about someone I don't really care about.In the end, I couldn't soldier through it and ended up skipping stuff that just didn't interest me. I skimmed the ending enough to get the general gist of it and felt just as hollow as I did reading the rest of this book. I feel the author gave me no reason to be invested in the story or characters, which is sad because I really wanted to be. Not as good as The Sweetness of Tears, but interesting.Muslim girl of Pakistani-Indo descent growing up in America. Her struggles to determine which values and norms from her faith and the "old" culture she will keep and which values and norms of the "new" culture she will adopt. Like the other book, different stories are told by different people to add to the overall picture, but mostly this is Saira's story. As it goes along, she learns all the tied up and hidden details of her mother and her father's pasts. She looks for her place in the world.I couldn't like her so much once she became an adult. She threw off the values she had been raised with with a sort of vengeance, diving into promiscuity, drugs, etc. in college. While the story is very interesting, and all the little familial customs and background stories weave a fascinating pattern, she just becomes less likeable as she gets older. For me, it's hard to really like a story if I don't like or respect the main character.It's probably good that I read The Sweetness of Tears first because I will try another of her books when she writes one. I can't for sure say that I would or wouldn't based off of this one.
