Mina Seckin

This was, on the surface, one of those tales of feckless introspective 20-somethings that's not quite my thing, but I liked this one—there's a bit more going on than just that. The book follows Sibel, a Turkish American 20-year-old premed student (sort of), in Turkey for a summer with her boyfriend to ostensibly help out her grandmother, who's in the early stages of Parkinson's disease.

There's a lot of family drama in addition to her own, which I think makes it interesting. It's about matriarchy more than anything else—Sibel, her grandmother, mother, and sister—and the most important male character is Sibel's recently deceased father, whose death doesn't leave so much of an absence in her life as it leaves a lot of questions: family secrets, inheritance (personality-wise, not stuff), and how she should be in the world. All of which looks like it's going to be too much for her, that she's too diffuse and neurasthenic to grapple with them. But in the end she rallies, which is a good payoff for having stuck with her.… (mehr)