Good People
Good People ~ Patmeena Sabit
The Sharaf family are an immigrant success story. The parents came to the US from Afghanistan and settled in Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC, and through intelligence and hard work, became extremely wealthy. Rahmat is a successful businessman, and Maryam is his wife and stay at home mother to their four children.
The parents have dreams that their eldest son, Omer, will be a world class surgeon, but he has other plans and doesn’t even want to go to community college. Now the dreams are pinned to their teenaged daughter, Zorah, becoming a lawyer. Zorah is an excellent student, and straddles the fine line between her American friends, school, and culture, and the much more rigid and traditional upbringing at the hands of her parents. She starts to rebel, her grades suffer, she has a boyfriend. The family goes on a quick vacation to Niagara Falls, and after a tragic accident, Zorah’s body is pulled from their submerged car.
Good People is told in a True Crime format, interviewing neighbors, friends, schoolmates, reporters, on and on. The people we never hear from are the Sharafs.
I don’t want to go into too much detail with this one, because I went in remembering nothing (not where I heard about it, not what it was about), and I think that is a good way to approach it. Excellently done, and highly recommended.
6 Comments
StephLove
I looked at the Goodreads entry for this book and it turns out there’s a giveaway, so I entered.
J
Oh, I hope you win!
ernie
Yowza. This sounds intense, and un-put-downable. Thanks for sharing it here.
J
It started off a little slow, but once it got going, yeah, totally binge worthy.
Jacquie
Oh, I just picked this up yesterday and am about 50 pages in!! I like the interview format and am interested to see where the story goes. I’m glad you’ve given it a good recommendation!
Michelle G.
This one sounds exciting! I’m listening to Gray After Dark right now, which you recommended, and I’m on the edge of my seat!