Bright Lines is more of a sprawling family novel than what I usually read, and I think that fact hindered my enjoyment of it in some places: I wanted it to be more tightly focused on a single character than it is. Instead, we get bits and pieces focused on the various inhabitants of a Clinton Hill brownstone: Anwar and Hashi Saleem, who moved to the US after the Bangladesh Liberation War, plus their daughter Charu, who’s 18 and about to start college, plus their niece Ella, who’s now a college sophomore but who moved to Brooklyn with them as a child after her parents’ murder (and who starts going by El over the course of the book, as he realizes he identifies as male), plus Maya, one of Charu’s friends who has run away from her overbearing father (who’s an Islamic cleric and doesn’t want her to go to college), plus Ramona Espinal, a nurse who lives in the top-floor apartment that Anwar rents out.
The first section of the book is all Brooklyn summertime, Atlantic Avenue in June, the garden of the Saleems’ brownstone at night, Ella and Charu and Maya riding their bikes to Jacob Riis Park to go to the beach, or going to a Bushwick warehouse party together. (It’s also Hashi in her salon and Anwar in his shop and Anwar smoking pot with his friends after hours, but I wanted more of the kids.) In the second part of the book, the action jumps forward a few months and moves to Bangladesh, where Anwar and Hashi and Charu and El are visiting Hashi’s remaining family (her father and much-younger brother), after which we get an epilogue in Brooklyn focusing on El and Maya and Charu, which is probably my favorite part of the book, maybe because really I would have liked a whole book just about El and Maya. That said, I couldn’t help admiring the way the different strands of all the book’s stories (the different characters, and Brooklyn and Bangladesh, and past and present) were woven together.
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