Maya's Reviews > Three Daughters of Eve

A militant atheist and a feminist muslima move in together – how’s that going to work out? At the end of the book, we don’t really know. These two of the three Daughters of Eve from the title didn’t get enough screen time to really flesh them out as characters. I wanted them to really have a go at each other, to put it all out there, to learn more about their history, motivations and opinions, because a novel is a perfect place to create an unrealistic setting to force characters to have a debate which is easily avoided in real life. It’s only in 2 or 3 rather short scenes that they confront each other directly, without going very deep into the content matter. To be fair though, the author was probably going for something different, as the book is completely focused on the other one of Eve’s daughters.

The sweetest scenes in this novel:

- A child decorates an “Islamic Christmas tree”, in an attempt to reach a compromise between her atheist father and muslim mother.

- The same child stages a private funeral ceremony for a dead hedgehog after being told that animals don’t go to heaven.

Such sweet and earnest gestures, the not unrealistically simple yet creative thinking a child’s mind can come up with, when you just want everybody to get along – if only the world were this simple.

The child in question is the novel’s protagonist, Peri, a Turkish girl who is the personification of a moderate, of someone who is “in between”, caught in the middle. The central topics running through the book are theocracy vs secularism, religion vs atheism, the question of God and the concrete example of how these issues play themselves out on a larger scale in the case of Turkey.

Peri struggles with her faith, she grows up in the middle between two strong-minded parents, an atheist father and a deeply religious mother. The situation is then replicated when Peri later finds her two best friends at university to be the above-mentioned militant atheist and feminist muslima (together they form the 3 daughters of Eve from the title). Many times this ever-present tension that runs through Peri’s family and circle of friends is shown as mirroring the larger scale tensions that run through Turkish society, and as well to a lesser degree through British society.

The book touches on some of the big questions of life (is there a god?) and the current challenges of our time – how does it work when religious people move in with secular atheists? How can world views that are polar opposites of each other coexist in close proximity? Rather than giving definite answers, the author trusts the reader to be able to handle all kinds of different points of view and paints a complex picture, thus ultimately making the book a pleasantly thoughtful and moderate/balanced read – even though a lot of dramatic things do happen. And I'm not sure what to make of the ending, as was certainly intended by the author.