Honor by Elif Shafak

Review by Shannon MacColl

The short:

A tale across time, land, and space of Kurdish and Turkish families both in their homelands and in England saddled with the burdens of duty and righteousness and the hopelessness of feeling like everything is beyond their control.

The long:

A tale of twins, Jamila and Pembe, from a Kurdish village who while almost identical in appearance have their fates go in drastically different directions. Jamila stays and becomes a midwife while Pembe follows her husband (who loved Jamila), Adem, to England where they have a family but the societal expectations of home follow them. Adem tries to escape becoming his drunken angry father and his loveless marriage but instead finds his own vice in gambling and abandons them. Pembe attempts to raise her three children, Yunus, Esma, and her eldest Iskender in this new land. Each child attempts to navigate this in their own way with Iskender facing the toughest internal battle of being an angry 16 year old and somehow the man of the house.

As Pembe, Adem, Yunus, and Esma all try to make sense of their own struggles with flashes from the past and present - Iskender faces the pressure of maintaining the honor of the family. It

is this conflict between past and present, honor and freedom, which causes Iskender to make a life-changing and life-ending decision.

To read or not to read:

Read. It is a tad confusing with the 8+ alternating viewpoints and narratives but dives into an interesting, if not difficult and extreme, aspect of the conflicts felt between immigrants in new lands and their first-generation children who sit at the crossroads of the new and old. The echoing from the past into the present keeps a guiding string throughout the narrative that keeps the reader engaged.