When We Were Sisters

From the first page, Fatimah Asghar’s writing pulled me in. It is poetic, playful, and vulnerable.

The story is about three orphaned sisters living under the care of their uncle and figuring out how to relate to each other and the world. I loved the candid explorations of childhood, gender, and, most of all, sisterhood. 

Good reviews and prizes always help to shape my choice of novels, and this book had both. It also had an intriguing title. As one of six sisters (no brothers), I was puzzled by the past tense: in my experience, sisters are forever. I was also attracted by the Muslim culture. Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of fiction about immigrants and cultural experiences very different from my own.

This is a painful story in many ways, about three orphaned girls who are forced by an indifferent (at best) uncle to grow up in an underground American reality. But they… show more.