Susan Snow is a weight loss guru, running a support group for people looking to get in shape and taking great pleasure from creating amazing, tailored recipes to help each of her members with their own specific dietary challenges. With a good home life and her daughter being an academic and sporting superstar at school, life is pretty great, and her next goal of getting her class through a 7K run looks sure to be a big success. However, are there dark clouds on the horizon for Susan? What if the foundations of her happy life prove to be less solid than she thought?

Susan’s weight loss group have their own very diverse issues – Angela’s biggest challenge is to avoid contentment eating, she’s so happy to have found a new life in Canada, while for Mina, weight loss is really the least of her worries: having fled war-torn Syria to keep her family safe, she struggles to find the right harmony between Canadian and Muslim culture for herself and her daughter.

This book bravely takes on some difficult themes, including body image, depression and the challenges faced by Muslim Syrian women in reconciling their faith and cultural practices with life in North America. Inevitably these themes make for uncomfortable reading at times, but they are dealt with sensitively and skilfully by the author, and the difficult task of weaving them into an enjoyable story is successfully achieved. As with the author’s previous works, I found myself wanting an extra chapter or two at the end – particularly to explore further the matter of a certain magic mirror – but as the expression goes, always leave them wanting more… :)