Very ear­ly in Esther Chehebar’s Sis­ters of For­tune, bride-to-be For­tune Cohen finds her­self with some unex­pect­ed time on her hands. She decides to curl up with one of her old­er sister’s books, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

With that minor detail, Chehe­bar prac­ti­cal­ly invites com­par­isons between her live­ly, heart­warm­ing debut nov­el and Jane Austen’s mas­ter­piece of roman­tic com­e­dy. One of Chehebar’s ear­ly, enthu­si­as­tic read­ers even described her as a ​“Jew­ish Jane Austen.”

While Austen’s com­e­dy of man­ners fol­lowed the for­tunes of the five Ben­net sis­ters in rur­al Eng­land at the turn of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, Chehe­bar sets hers in the gos­sipy, tight-knit Syr­i­an Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in Brook­lyn in the ear­ly 2000s, where the three Cohen sis­ters — Nina, For­tune, and Lucy — are wrestling with a lot of momen­tous decisions.

With her wed­ding loom­ing in two months, For­tune, the obe­di­ent mid­dle sis­ter, is start­ing to ques­tion her engage­ment to respectable but dull Saul Dweck. Not only is there no chem­istry, but For­tune is not sure she is ready to ful­ly embrace the life man­dat­ed by her Ortho­dox Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty, suc­cinct­ly summed up by her beloved Sit­to, or grand­moth­er, like this: ​“There are only two things in a woman’s life that should nev­er be kept emp­ty: her womb and her freezer.” 

Then there is the old­est sis­ter, Nina, the rebel of the fam­i­ly. Nina is stub­born, dis­re­spect­ful, and, at age twen­ty-six, still sin­gle, which means prac­ti­cal­ly over the hill in this tra­di­tion-bound neigh­bor­hood of Mid­wood. Round­ing out the trio is Lucy, a senior at her yeshi­va high school, and ​“too beau­ti­ful to rebel,” accord­ing to For­tune. Lucy is secret­ly dat­ing a tall, dark, and hand­some doc­tor — the scion of a fam­i­ly wealth­i­er than the Cohens and more than a decade old­er than her.

Chehe­bar — a con­tribut­ing writer at Tablet mag­a­zine, where she cov­ers the Sephardic Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty — knows this insu­lar world well. She cap­tures its joys and sor­rows, its quirks and its cus­toms, with vivid, often humor­ous details, from the class­es girls take after they get engaged about when they can and can­not have sex to the prop­er appear­ance of a mouth-water­ing knafeh.

Sus­pense mounts as Fortune’s doubts about Saul grow, cul­mi­nat­ing in an epiphany of sorts dur­ing her pre-mar­riage mik­vah immer­sion. Mis­fit Nina final­ly lands a job at a com­pa­ny that suits her: an indie rock label in Bush­wick where she just hap­pens to recon­nect with Steven, a nice Jew­ish guy from her past. Even Lucy, the most con­fi­dent and care­free of the three, has trou­bles to con­tend with. She wor­ries that she won’t be able to keep up her end of the con­ver­sa­tion when she and her dream­boat David get togeth­er with his fan­cy col­lege-edu­cat­ed friends. Despite all the tumult, Chehe­bar deft­ly resolves the dif­fer­ent sto­ry lines with a birth, a death, and plat­ters upon plat­ters of deli­cious Mid­dle East­ern food.