Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Terra McKinnish

Author:  Alan Drew

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign

288 pages, published February 5, 2008

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In a small town outside Istanbul, Sinan Basioglu, a devout Kurdish Muslim, and his wife, Nilüfer, are preparing to celebrate their nine-year-old son Ismail’s coming-of-age ceremony. Their fifteen-year-old daughter, İrem, resents the attention given by her parents to Ismail.   In contrast, when she came of age, there was no celebration.  Instead, she had to start wearing a hijab and stay hidden away from boys.  After a massive earthquake destroys their home, Sinan focuses all of his attention on finding Ismail, ignoring the plight of his wife and daughter.  Miraculously, Ismail is saved by the expatriate wife of a Marcus, a missionary from America who lives in the same building.  Marcus’ wife dies in the earthquake, leaving behind Dylan, her teenage son who has secretly been developing a relationship with Irem.  The Basioglu family has lost everything and are forced to live as refugees in a Christian Missionary camp run by Marcus.  Sinan struggles with his inability to support his family, the Christian influence of the camp and the pulling away of his daughter as she secretly falls in love with Dylan.

Quotes 

“Our children are not ours. That’s our mistake. We think they are. It seems so for a while—a few brief years—but they aren’t. They never were.”

 

“It’s all a gift. All of life is a gift.”

 

“Instead, he stared at every woman he saw in hijab, his anger flaring when he saw a fundamentalist, dressed in black from head to toe, as if she were already dead. It was one thing to be humble and modest, but it seemed to Sinan that the abaya revealed men’s disgust with women, as though men thought God had made a mistake and they needed to hide it. Sinan would never make his wife and daughter wear such a thing; he would never allow them to be so blotted out of existence.”

 

“He was a Kurd and the world would tell him he was nothing. He was poor and the world would give him nothing. He was a Muslim and the world would ignore him, and being ignored was like being dead. The boy had his name and his name was everything. Take away his name and the boy had no future, no honor, no respect, no reason to look in a mirror and see his own perfection. “Ouch, Baba! You’re doing it too hard.” Ismail’s skin was red from the scrubbing. He stopped and told the boy to rinse off. What if Irem did something that denied her entry to Heaven? Skin was only the container of the soul, but the soul was a fragile membrane—it could easily be ripped and once it was, there was no sewing it back together. To kill her before she destroyed that, she would remain innocent, she would enter Paradise as a child, as clean as the day she was born. And Ismail wouldn’t have to feel less than anyone in this world, ever.”

 

“I never gave a damn about independence, anyway. All I really wanted to do was farm. Didn’t care if the land was called Kurdistan or Turkey or Iraq. But the stupid PKK and the military won’t leave you alone; you’re everyone’s enemy if you just want to be left alone. You’ve got to pick a side.” He tossed his cigarette down in disgust. “Is there anywhere in the world you can just be left alone?”

My Take

Gardens of Water was an intriguing read that explored universal themes such as the relationships between parents and children, the conflict between the new world and the old, and the strain between tradition and personal freedom.  I didn’t know that much about Islam and felt that I learned a bit about the religion after reading this book, especially the conflict between traditional Islam and the modern world.