Review: Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak

This is one of the most interesting books which touches everyone's soul. The whole story of the book revolves around the protagonist Peri, a wealthy Turkish housewife, who has always been confused when it comes towards matters related to religion. 

The title talks about three characters of the story: "The Sinner, The Believer and The Confused." These are three girls studying together at Oxford, all being totally different from each other.

Coming to the point, Elif Shafak draws three phases of Peri's life: her childhood, teenage and adulthood. In her childhood, she is taught about religion from her parents. But she is unable to understand fully about God because her mother is too religious whereas her father is too secular. Her parents have different views about God and religion. So this is her childhood when she grows up in Turkey but does not find herself to have a spiritual relation with God. She always moves on in haphazard path-way.

In the second phase of teenage, she takes admission in Oxford University. She wants to know more about divinity. Here she meets an Iranian girl, Shirin and an American girl, Mona. One is the sinner and the other is the believer. Contrarily Peri is confused. Peri finds a little space in her life about God. Her guider, Professor Azur puts several questions about God. What is God? Does he really exist? He comes to know the inner war of Peri juggling with plenty of questions about religion. He tries to connect her relation with God spiritually. And Peri fell in love with Professor Azur.

In her third phase of adulthood, we find impacts of her childhood and teenage periods in her life. After conducting many conversation with her friends and Professor Azur, she finds a change in her life. She comes to know the existence of God and deep spiritual relation with Him. Now it is her new path, a new journey towards God.

Before her adulthood, she wished to love God for the love of God and not for the promise of rewards or because of the fear instilled in her mind ever since, like anybody else, since childhood. This book ends with the main character admitting that what she mistook as true love was a mere temporary infatuation with the image of a specific person that she had created in her own head. At last Peri realizes: 

      "We suffer in the hands of the gods that we ourselves created." 

After reading this book, no doubt Elif Shafak gets warm feelings from readers to explore some of their deep thoughts regarding God, religion, deep cultural beliefs, the immature jealousies of our youth, uncontrollable young love and attraction and also about feministic point of view.

"Education is important, but there's something far more important for a girl, you understand? If you lose that, no diploma will redeem you. Boys have nothing to lose. Girls need to be extra careful."

At the end, I'll just say it's a literary piece which touches my soul deeply and makes my relation strong with God ever before. Really, the more I turned pages, the more I felt heartfelt ponderance. It's a must read novel, a spiritual journey.

-Amina Ashraf

Nov 11, 2021