Jennifer Klepper’s debut Unbroken Threads is a lovely, thoughtful book about the intersection between two women’s lives.
The protagonist is a former securities lawyer who’s been a stay-at-home-mother, Jessica. She’s trying to re-enter the work force by doing pro bono work with an organization that helps refugees with the complex and often arcane procedures in solved in seeking political asylum in the United States. Her first case involves Amina, a Syrian woman who wears a hijab.
The characters grow nicely as the novel progresses. For example, Jessica, the lawyer, realizes that she is more prejudiced than she believed she was while her clearly more-bigoted husband also moves toward less intolerant views. Both women overcome biases toward each other as their friendship deepens.
Though on the surface Unbroken Threads, is about refugees and prejudice, it is also the story of two women finding themselves through the friendship and their individual and joint travails. Klepper, the author also guides readers in understanding the Syrian—and other—refugee crises and the challenges of being a refugee in the States. In this age of #OwnVoices, Klepper found the wherewithal to write from the point of view of a Syrian immigrant and does a superlative job weaving the lives of the two women together.
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Unbroken Threads is available through: Amazon | B&N
