This is the story of two Bangladeshi sisters who take very different paths in life. The older sister, Nazneen, goes to London to take part in an arranged marriage to a man twenty years her senior while the younger sister, Hasina, stays in Bangladesh and has a "love marriage" against her family's wishes. Nazneen must deal with the pressures of being a good Islamic wife and raising modern children in a racist English society. Hasina, who's father disowned her after her marriage and who left her husband after he began to beat her, must try to survive as a single woman in a poor Islamic society.
I learned a lot about Bangladesh and Islam while reading this book, not necessarily through the book but because when I didn't understand something about what was going on I looked it up. I found all of that to be very interesting because those are subjects I know very little about.
I found the end of this book to be very interesting. I didn't want to put the book down because I wanted to know what was going to happen next. But the beginning of the book was pretty slow and uneventful. Hasina's story was told almost entirely through letters from her to Nazneen, complete with very poor grammar. While this was an original way of telling the story, it was somewhat hard to read and those parts of the story didn't keep my attention very well.
My favorite part of the writing, though, was the author's use of similes and comparisons. For example, here is a passage describing Nazneen cooking:
The spices began to catch and gave off their round and intricate smell. It was a scent that made all others flat; it existed in spheres, the others in thin circles.
