These Impossible Things

“Malak […] pauses to watch Jenna and Kees. Wonders if this is how mothers feel when they stare at their children: frustrated but flooded with love.”

This note about how Malak sees her two best friends early in the novel introduces the idea that longstanding friendships can become more like familial relationships. This balance between frustration and love will become the thing that pulls the women temporarily apart and ultimately brings them back together.

“It’s also getting increasingly difficult to find the right version of herself to bring home.”

Kees discusses the difficulty of presenting herself in a way that her family will accept. These “versions” of herself cause her considerable anxiety in the text, ultimately making her feel distant from her faith. The novel does not provide an easy answer for this tension, as Kees’s family does react in anger when she reveals her relationship to Harry.

“In the moments between her father’s aspirations, her mother’s holding, and the teasing of siblings, Kees wonders how a person is expected to choose between family and love. As if the two things were mutually exclusive.”

The tension between family and romantic love for British Muslims, whose family expectations push them to marry within their faith, is a recurring tension in the novel. Kees’s observation about how “love” is not exclusive to romantic love makes this tension more palpable within the cultural narrative of romantic love as the primary affective attachment that one should have; Kees loves her family, too, and that love is important to her.