Maybe it was the exceptions we made for one another that brought God more pride than when we stood firm, maybe His heart opened when His creations opened their hearts to one another, and maybe that is why the boy was switched with the ram: so a father would not have to choose between his boy and his belief. There was another way.

–Mirza, A Place for Us, p. 291

Last night, with snot and tears, I finished Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place for Us, a novel about a Muslim Indian-American family. It is, unbelievably, the first novel by Mirza, that is richly complex and woven so thoughtfully. I kept pulling my Kindle from my face to think, this is masterful. It’s a first novel, really? 

Perhaps I’ll return to this book in a longer post, but for now, I’ll think about this wisdom from an unlikely source in the novel and how its lesson is both true and more complex than these two sentences even suggest.