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"  When we leave home, our self-knowledge and life goals are often thrown into disarray. For dutiful, driven only-child \u00ADAmina, the woman at the heart of Nell Freud\u00ADen\u00ADberger&amp;#039;s densely beautiful \u00ADnovel The Newlyweds (Knopf), advancing the plan that seemed most favor\u00ADable to her family\u2014bringing her parents out of Bangladesh to \u00ADAmerica after \u00ADgaining citizenship here herself\u2014is initially gratifying. Settling into suburban Rochester, New York, with her new American husband, George, the solid and seemingly sympathetic \u00ADengineer she met on the Inter\u00ADnet, Amina marvels at mailboxes, snow, and the local supermarket. She takes part-time \u00ADservice work and English classes and is \u00ADkindly if somewhat stiffly \u00ADembraced by her in-laws. But when \u00ADAmina learns that George is not so eager to install her parents in their three-bedroom split-level\u2014and also has a more complicated romantic history than he had let on\u2014her shame is searing. By the time Amina returns to Bangladesh to fetch her parents, we don&amp;#039;t know whether she will go back to George or pursue Nasir, her father&amp;#039;s best friend&amp;#039;s handsome, worldly son, for whom she finds she feels intense sexual desire. Even more stirring than this tension is Amina&amp;#039;s growing understanding that \u00ADmoving forward often involves losing one&amp;#039;s grip. Freudenberger, a deliciously precise and perceptive writer, loosely based Amina on a woman she met on an airplane, and when she describes Amina&amp;#039;s recognition &amp;quot;that the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together&amp;quot; is largely an illusion because we&amp;#039;re all &amp;quot;many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you,&amp;quot; we can only be glad they struck up what must have been a helluva conversation. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a20641/the-newlyweds-the-bride-who-fell-to-earth-654926/>