Book Review
Brick Lane
Review by Joyce Ruiz
Brick Lane by Monica Ali. This book is told through the eyes of two Bangladeshi sisters -- the plain Nazneen and the prettier Hasina -- we see the divergent paths of the contemporary descendants of an ancient culture. Hasina elopes to a "love marriage," and young Nazneen, in an arranged marriage, is pledged to a much older man living in London. Ali's skillful narrative focuses on Nazneen's stifling life with her ineffectual husband, who keeps her imprisoned in a city housing project filled with immigrants in varying degrees of assimilation. But Ali reveals a bittersweet tension between the "two kinds of love" Nazneen and her sister experience -- that which begins full and overflowing, only to slowly dissipate, and another which emerges like a surprise, growing unexpectedly over years of faithful commitment. Both of these loves have their own pitfalls: Hasina's passionate romance crumbles into domestic violence, and Nazneen's marriage never quite reaches a state of wedded bliss.
More Reviews
- ?Teacher Man? by Frank McCourt
- The Center of Everything
- The Stephanie Plum Detective Series
- The Mma Precious Ramotswe Series
- Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
- Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind
- Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World
- Don't Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America