Honor: A Novel
*Starred Review* Best-selling Turkish writer Shafak’s literary powers resemble those of a djinni in command of whirlwinds. Like her cyclonic family drama The Bastard of Istanbul (2007), her newest is a gyre of multiple points of view, flashbacks, and tragic moral dilemmas. At the center are twin sisters, Jamila and Pembe, born in a Kurdish village where girls are valued only for their purity and obedience. Theirs is a culture in which any suggestion of female impropriety, however unjustified, can be grounds for an honor killing because, as one man asserts, “honor was all that some men had in this world.” Jamila ends up living alone in rural Turkey, relied upon as a healer and known as the “Virgin Midwife.” Pembe is unhappy in London with her feckless, unfaithful husband, Adem. Their smart, skeptical daughter, Esma, wants “to be a writer, but not a female one”; their younger son Yunus discovers a wildly permissive enclave among druggie punk squatters; and the eldest, Iskender, feels duty bound to defend his family’s honor after Pembe is seen with another man. At every turn in this trenchant, dazzlingly imaginative, suspenseful, mystical, and socially astute novel, Shafak sheds light on the crushing consequences of oppressive gender roles, the struggles of immigrants, and the divide between brutal traditions and the quest for freedom and love. --Donna Seaman--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.