The Marriage Box by Corie Adjmi
Book Feature - The Marriage Box by Corie Adjmi
HBL Note: I’ve been holding onto a copy of The Marriage Box by Corie Adjmi for nearly a year. It was originally scheduled for publication in August of 2022 and was later pushed to May of 2023. I’m thrilled that Corie’s pub-date is finally here so I can share her long-awaited novel with you. She is also the author of Life and Other Shortcomings: Stories, which received several awards including 2020 International Book Awards, 2020 American Fiction Award, and the 2021 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award. THE MARRIAGE BOX is being touted as perfect for fans of My Unorthodox Life (did you binge that show like I did??) Scroll down to read more.
"Corie Adjmi's stories are sharply written, unsparing, and spot-on. With wisdom and humanity, Life and Other Shortcomings plumbs the mysteries of adult life: the menacing underside of love, the protean nature of grief, and the baffling difficulty of staying true to ourselves and the things we value most. Assured in her storytelling, Adjmi writes with force and perception. Her stories are a must-read."―Elyssa Friedland, author of Last Summer at the Golden Hotel, The Floating Feldmans, The Intermission, and Love and Miss Communication
Book Feature - The Marriage Box by Corie Adjmi
Book Feature - The Marriage Box by Corie Adjmi
From the publisher:
Casey Cohen, a Middle Eastern Jew, is a sixteen-year-old in New Orleans in the 1970s when she starts hanging out with the wrong crowd. Then she gets in trouble and her parents turn her whole world upside down by deciding to return to their roots, the Orthodox Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn.
In this new and foreign world, families gather weekly for Shabbat dinner; parties are extravagant events at the Museum of Natural History; and the Marriage Box is a real place, a pool deck designated for teenage girls to put themselves on display for potential husbands. Casey is at first shocked by this unfamiliar culture, but after she meets Michael, she’s enticed by it. Looking for love and a place to belong, she marries him at eighteen, believing she can adjust to Syrian ways. But she begins to question her decision when she discovers that Michael doesn’t want her to go to college; he wants her to have a baby instead.
Can Casey integrate these two opposing worlds, or will she have to leave one behind in order to find her way?
Book Feature - The Marriage Box by Corie Adjmi
