★★★★★☆☆
Title: Home Fire
Author: Kamila Shamsie
Genre: Contemporary Fiction / Retelling
First published: 2017
Edition: paperback, published by Bloomsbury in 2018
Practical-minded Isma has spent the years since her mother’s death watching out for her twin brother and sister in their North London home. When an invitation to grad school in America comes through unexpectedly, it brings the irresistible promise of freedom too long deferred. But even an ocean away, Isma can’t stop worrying about her beautiful, headstrong, politically inclined sister, Aneeka, and Parvaiz, their brother, who seems to be adrift—until suddenly he is half a globe away in Raqqa, trying to prove himself to the dark legacy of the father he never knew, with no road back.
In this novel the author used the framework of Sophocles’ Antigone to build a very current multidimensional story.
The tale is told in sections from a number of perspectives, which all come together to show the impact the jihadist movement has on Muslim families living in Britain. The idea of having to consider how your every action could come across is deeply troubling and heartbreaking , yet the reality of many of the families living not only in Britain, but across the western world. This novel manages to convey this heinous fact and also explores the conflicts of love, both in the familial and romantic sense.
This was a very powerful read, but I regret that I did not fall in love with this book. Though I enjoyed it, I never felt quite pulled in. I think this was the writing more than the subject matter. I always felt quite distant from the characters in the various perspectives and I found it a little frustrating. I did not believe in the characters as much as I wanted to.
Overall, despite my own frustrations, this was a really good read that I would highly recommend and it is a subject matter I would like to explore more.
5 out of 7 stars
