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A Novel
by Esther Chehebar
In this hilarious, heart-warming debut novel, three Syrian Jewish sisters chase love and grapple with the growing pains of young womanhood as they seek their place within and beyond their Brooklyn community.
The Cohen sisters are at a crossroads. And not just because the middle sister, Fortune, is starting to question her decision to get married in just a few months. Nina, the eldest sister, is single at 26 (and growing cobwebs by her community's standards) when she runs into an old childhood friend who offers her the chance to leave behind the pressure to follow in her younger sister's footsteps. Meanwhile, Lucy, the youngest, a senior at her yeshiva high school, has recently started sneaking around with a mysterious older bachelor that has everybody asking themselves, 'Fortune, who?'
As Fortune inches ever closer to the chuppah, the three sisters find themselves in a tug of war between tradition and modernity, reckoning with what their community wants and with what they want for themselves—and all while learning how to roll the perfect grape leaf under the tutelage of their charismatic grandmother, Sitto, who fled Syria in 1992, and of their mother Sally, whose anxieties are tangled up in her daughters' futures.
Sisters of Fortune is a sister story about dating, ambition, and coming-of-age under the scope of an immigrant community whose coded language is endearing, maddening, and never boring. The book reckons with what we dream for ourselves, our daughters, and granddaughters. It is concerned as much with where we come from as where we are going—and, above all, with what we are eating for dinner. (And who is making it).
"A vibrant celebration of identity and the push-pull between heritage and autonomy." —Kirkus Reviews
"Sisters of Fortune is part coming-of-age story, part slice-of-life exploration of conservative Syrian Jewish life in America. The family dynamics are compelling...This debut is fun and engaging, featuring alternating points of view among the sisters. It will especially appeal to readers interested in culture, family, and Jewish traditions." —Booklist
"Esther Chehebar is a Jewish Jane Austen exploring the universal themes of sisterhood, advantageous marriage, and community dynamics. Through the prism of her hilariously detailed look into Sephardic life, we get a joyful peek into the pod, seeing what makes this world so wildly different but also so very much the same at heart." —Jill Kargman, creator of Odd Mom Out
"An absolute joy of a novel about a most enviable family, this is a book to savor—a feast for the heart and mind. Read it if you yearn to be immersed in matriarchy at its finest." —Elisa Albert, author of Human Blues
This information about Sisters of Fortune was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Esther Chehebar is a contributing writer at Tablet magazine, where she covers Sephardic Jewish tradition and community, and a member of Sephardic Bikur Holim, a non-profit supporting the growing Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from the New School and has had her work featured in Glamour and Man Repeller. Chehebar's first book, I Share My Name, was an illustrated children's book explaining the Sephardic tradition of naming children for their grandparents. She lives in New York with her husband, their kids, their Ori-Pei named Jude, and a couple of fish. This is her debut novel.
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