Zaina Arafat

2020. Uneven, but readable. The protagonist is a closeted, Palestinian-American woman, with a beautiful, but cruel, narcissistic mother. She’s been to recovery for anorexia and in the course of the story she spends a month at a treatment center for love/sex addiction. I didn’t see much healing result. She still had many and overlapping relationships after treatment. I guess I didn’t think the character progressed enough. Also it seemed to suffer from telling the reader what the emotions of the characters were rather than showing through their actions or dialogue sometimes. I wish there had been more about being Palestinian because that was really interesting, but it was much downplayed in favor of her obsessing about love and sex and her mother. Needed better editing I think. Somewhat lackluster.… (altro)

The novel is non linear, so passages set in the current will be sandwiched between flashbacks of the past. Our narrator describes her volatile relationship with her mother, and her struggles as a Palestinian American. She’s often reckless. She has the tendency to cling to dysfunctional relationships and even seeks treatment for it. I can see how others would find her unlikable, but I found myself wanting the narrator to overcome her demons and find love. ⁣
I fell into reading easily with this book. I loved the style of the prose and felt the flashbacks really helped you better understand the narrator and her behavior. As someone who hasn’t read many books featuring Arab characters (and I should be better about that) reading this book opened my eyes to parts of a culture that I knew nothing about. ⁣… (altro)