Featured in a blog post at https://booksbeyondbinaries.blog/2020/07/20/chapter-books-whats-good/ (July 20th release)

This book reviewed in a blog post at https://booksbeyondbinaries.blog/2020/08/03/all-eyes-on-her/

This novel explores an important subject, female genital mutilation as it is practiced in certain Indian communities, and I appreciated gaining a greater understanding of the issues. However, I felt lukewarm about the story itself, though I did like the historical details of a parallel storyline set several generations earlier. ( )

I thought this was a well-told book with an important message. But I do have one problem with it. Farzana Doctor is Canadian so why would she choose to have her protagonists live in New York City? They weren't even in New York for the greater part of the book as they took a sabbatical year in Mumbai. Why couldn't they have done that from Toronto or Calgary or Vancouver? I really thought in this day and age that we had gotten past having to have characters be American even when the story is written by a Canadian. I doubt British writers feel that there characters have to be American or live in the US.

Okay, rant over, what is this book about?

Sharifa, Murtuza and their daughter Zee leave their New York City apartment and move to Mumbai so that Murtuza can spend his sabbatical teaching Canadian literature at a university there. Sharifa was born in India but her parents left soon after her birth and moved to the US. They returned frequently and Sharifa and her two female cousins of the same age were close. Sharifa plans to do a research project to learn about her great-great-grandfather who came from poor beginnings but became wealthy, ultimately leaving most of his estate to charity. She must also home-school Zee while they are in India. One of her cousins, Fatema, has become outspoken about female genital mutilation which she claims is still being performed on girls in their Muslim sect, the Dawoodi Bohra. She also discloses to Sharifa that she was mutilated when she was seven years old. Even more shocking she claims that Sharifa and their other cousin were operated on at the same time. This may explain why Sharifa has never had an orgasm but Sharifa's mother says that she never agreed to the mutilation (called khatna). Fatema claims that the three girls were taken to an apartment by their aunt and grandmother and that khatna was performed on all of them. As the truth slowly dawns on Sharifa she becomes worried about her own daughter who is just seven year's old now. She forbids Zee being left alone with the aunt because she is afraid that her aunt will go ahead with khatna on Zee just as she did years ago with Sharifa.

The WHO estimates that over 200 million girls and women alive today are victims of female genital mutilation (FGM). I had no idea that the practice was so prevalent in our modern world. The WHO says that there are no health benefits to the practise and, in fact, there are many complications. When you consider that it is underage girls who are the victims it is clear that this is an abuse and human rights issue. ( )

This novel is very readable and also very timely. Doctor is a member of the Dawoodi Bohra community, centered in India but with significant numbers and other countries, including the US and Canada. They have a traditional form of FGM called khatna, that is slowly and recently coming under fire by women from within the community. Doctor is part of that movement, and this novel is her contribution to fighting khatna through awareness and understanding about the procedure itself and its risks and results.

In this novel, Sharifa and her husband spend several months in India for his job. They stay near her extended family. Since she will not be working while there, he decides to work on a genealogical study of her great-great-grandfather and his four wives. While working on the project she meets with many distant relatives, reconnects with her two closest cousins, learns about the growing movement against khatna, and learns more than she ever expected about her family and herself. This is a very carefully designed political novel, if a little hard to believe in some parts (no spoilers!).

See "How Do You Write Your Community's Hard Truths" thewalrus.ca 8 Oct 2020 for more details.

Thank you to librarything and Farzana Doctor for providing me with an ARC of this book. ( )