Review - When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar

Title: When We Were Sisters*

Author: Fatimah Asghar

Rating: 4.25 stars / 5 stars 

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Favorite Quote: “I wonder how it would be if all our memories stacked up together, what would be real and what would be make-believe.” 

Review: Thank you to the publisher, One World, and the NetGalley platform for the free e-ARC that I received in exchange for an unbiased review.

This is a book to read slowly, just to savor it. In its pages, readers will find Kausar, the youngest of three orphaned sisters sent to live with their uncle after the death of their father. From the start, the sisters are crammed into a space, hidden from their uncle’s wife and biological children, so that he is able to take whatever money that was meant for them following the death of their father, while caring for them only in terms of providing a roof over their heads and food from time to time. Other than that, the sisters are left largely on their own, minus the occasional renter or uncle’s mistress who also occupy the small apartment. As the novel progresses, readers follow as each sister ages from childhood to adulthood, focusing specifically on Kausar’s sexual and gender identities, the evolution of her relationship with her sisters as they sometimes meld into one and other times shatter apart, and her shifting place in religion and her definition of “family.” 

This book stands apart in a number of ways, but particularly in its structure and in its exploration of “identity.” 

In terms of the structure, the narrative shifts from a more “traditional” novel structure (a linear story told from an established point of view), to a more fractured, sometimes stream of consciousness structure that mimics the destabilized environment in which Kausar and her sisters are thrust into upon arriving in their uncle’s apartment. 

The concept of identity is one that is explored in great detail in this relatively short novel. Particularly, Kausar’s religious identity, gender identity, and sexual identity are all explored on the page, but so is something more profound. The sisters, in their shared trauma, are melded together in many ways, psychically, emotionally, and, because of the size of the apartment, a shared, forced physical proximity as well. Kausar is often found pondering where one of them ends and the next begins, and the answer is that there wasn’t always an answer. 

The novel is also a study in the complexities of grief. There is, of course, the loss of their parents - a mother they can barely remember and a father whose murder triggers their moving to live with their uncle. The sisters’ grief surrounding these deaths permeates the entire novel. But there’s also the grief surrounding the loss of their chosen family (a couple without biological children who live in the apartment complex temporarily), the loss of their childhoods, and, in the end, the loss of their uncle - someone who was responsible for their countless miseries for the bulk of their lives, but also someone who they formed some sort of allegiance to (the layers of emotional abuse and instability throughout the novel is also profound). 

About that Quote: The perspective in this novel is interesting because there is a chance that the narrator is unreliable, but not in the way “unreliable narrator” is traditionally understood. This isn’t out of malice or to forward a mystery intentionally leaving readers hanging, but rather because the world is big and scary and traumatic and Kausar and her sisters are simply trying to cope and grow and survive. And sometimes the act of remembering, or of not remembering, is the foundation for that survival. This quote comes towards the end of the book, a book that in many ways shows the reader what Kausar experienced and remembered. What of it was real? What of it wasn’t? And what, exactly, does “real” mean, anyways? This book doesn’t answer these questions so much as pose them in a prose that is equal parts haunting and deliberate. 

Incomplete TW list: Allusions to CSA (not on page - the uncle threatens to accuse the neighbor of CSA against Kausar), parent death, m*rder, bullying, questionable consent

Have you read When We Were Sisters? Share your thoughts below!