About this talk

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?

For more information about the book, see: https://corieadjmi.com/books/the-marriage-box#order

About the Author

Corie Adjmi is the best-selling, award-winning author of the novel The Marriage Box and the short story collection Life and Other Shortcomings. She has won a number of International Book Awards, American Fiction Awards, Best Book Awards and an IBPA Benjamin Franklin award. The Jewish Chronicle included The Marriage Box on a list of Best Jewish Books and Corie's prize-winning essays and short stories have appeared in dozens of journals and magazines, including HuffPost, Newsweek, North American Review, Indiana Review, Medium, Motherwell and Kveller. When Corie is not writing, she does volunteer work, cooks, draws, bikes and hikes. She and her husband have five children and a number of grandchildren, with more on the way. She lives and works in New York City.