Inside the house of blessings and other stories about Egypt and Palestine
Author: Mandy Fessenden Brauer
Faraxa Publishing / 2026
Pages: 260
Dr Mandy Fessenden Brauer is a clinical child psychologist born and raised at The Fessenden School, a boys' boarding and day school set up by her grandfather in Massachusetts.
She enjoys helping children feel better about themselves and understand more about the world.
In California she has worked with Native Americans living in reservations, foster children, juvenile delinquents, sick and dying children. She had a private practice treating children of stars and victims of violence. She has also treated adults who she considers to be like grown up children.
After her husband took up a position with UNRWA in Gaza, she worked with those traumatised by war and continued to do so when they moved to Egypt, where she gave workshops about loss and grief and dealing with paediatric cancer.
She taught psychology at the American University of Cairo and was a Fulbright Scholar at the Cairo University Medical School.
She and her husband lived for one year in Armenia shortly after a devastating earthquake and newly-acquired independence from the former Soviet Union and then returned to Cairo.
Currently she, her husband and three cats divide their time between Cairo and Indonesia where she writes, reads and enjoys walking along the Nile and strolling through rice paddies.
She also writes poetry which she says rarely manages to escape her computer.
The book being reviewed today is a collection of stories she wrote from time to time, focusing on the Middle East about teens and young adults. As they reach adolescence, they inevitably face normal but embarrassing situations as part of their growth.
But for readers in this side of the world it is a very different world that she describes. There is of course a different culture, religion, language and tradition to consider.
There are some remarkable stories told. For instance, the story that shares its title with the book follows an adolescent girl in an all-girls institution as she navigates the turbulence of emerging sexual desire, peer rivalry, and jealousy. Ultimately, she succeeds in transforming feelings of anger and shame into an act of reconciliation.
Not all stories happened in the Middle East. Some take place in the US but within the Middle East diaspora.
Obviously some stories show the reality as experienced by young people suffering restrictions and worse as a result of Intifada anti-Israel civil rights but no mention is made of 7 October and the bloodbath that followed. Nor is there, to be fair, the violent language that is so common today.
Some stories reflect the situation in the impoverished suburbs of Cairo, the dust of houses and streets as well as the factories still living in the Middle Ages.
In conclusion I point to the story which struck me most, Expect the unexpected. A girl finds out her father has a second family with a girl her age he kept hidden from her. The Muslim religion admits second contemporary marriages and while we might think this is outrageous the book explains how people get around such situations. This side of the world has such institutions as divorce to regularise such situations but maybe the Muslim way opens the way to a different way of handling such inevitable situations. We tend to demonise those with whom we disagree but maybe we ought to listen more.
The very next chapter, Engagement, shows the Muslim way of dealing with life-long commitment, what we could probably call a two-stage marriage.
In our own society we tend to hide, under thick carpets, the fall-out from lapses of matrimonial faithfulness through outright lies, from the era of the Knights to the suave live-and-let-live of British colonial times. It is healthy, I believe, to consider the alternatives without ruling them out.