Sisters of Fortune — Esther Chehebar

In this hilarious, heart-warming debut novel, three Syrian Jewish sisters chase love and grapple with the growing pains of young womanhood as they seek their place within and beyond their Brooklyn community.

The Cohen sisters are at a crossroads. And not just because the middle sister, Fortune, is starting to question her decision to get married in just a few months. Nina, the eldest sister, is single at 26 (and growing cobwebs by her community's standards) when she runs into an old childhood friend who offers her the chance to leave behind the pressure to follow in her younger sister's footsteps. Meanwhile, Lucy, the youngest, a senior at her yeshiva high school, has recently started sneaking around with a mysterious older bachelor that has everybody asking themselves, 'Fortune, who?'

As Fortune inches ever closer to the chuppah, the three sisters find themselves in a tug of war between tradition and modernity, reckoning with what their community wants and with what they want for themselves -- and all while learning how to roll the perfect grape leaf under the tutelage of their charismatic grandmother, Sitto, who fled Syria in 1992, and of their mother Sally, whose anxieties are tangled up in her daughters' futures.

Sisters of Fortune is a sister story about dating, ambition, and coming-of-age under the scope of an immigrant community whose coded language is endearing, maddening, and never boring. The book reckons with what we dream for ourselves, our daughters, and granddaughters. It is concerned as much with where we come from as where we are going -- and, above all, with what we are eating for dinner. (And who is making it).