Book Club: Sisters of Fortune

Esther Chehebar is a contributing writer at Tablet magazine, where she covers Sephardic Jewish tradition and community. 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. Sisters of Fortune is her debut novel.

Sisters of Fortune: 
In this heart-warming and witty debut novel from a “Jewish Jane Austen” (Jill Kargman), three sisters chase love and grapple with the growing pains of young womanhood as they seek their place within and beyond their Syrian Jewish Brooklyn community.

The Cohen sisters are at a crossroads. And not just because the obedient middle sister, Fortune, has secretly started to question her engagement and impending wedding, even as her family scrambles to prepare for the big day. Nina, the rebellious eldest sister, is single at 26 (and growing cobwebs by her community's standards) when she runs into an old friend who offers her a chance to choose a different path. Meanwhile, Lucy, the youngest, a senior in high school, has started sneaking around with a charming older bachelor.

As Fortune inches ever closer to the chuppah, the sisters find themselves in a tug of war between tradition and modernity, reckoning with what their tight-knit community wants—and with what they want for themselves.

Sisters of Fortune is a sister story about dating, ambition, and coming-of-age within an immigrant community whose affection is endearing, maddening, and never boring. This novel reckons with the roots that entwine our lives to the ones who love us best, the dreams we hold for our daughters—and the winding paths we take to our own happy endings.

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