It's never a good sign when you're barely twenty pages into a book and your mind starts wandering to all the little chores you could be doing instead. I found the story monotonous and the style stultifying. The Syrian civil war is a topic that deserves a far better book than this.

Received via NetGalley. ( )

A fascinating look at the war in Syria from the perspective of a teen girl. But Rima is no ordinary narrator. She is mute (possibly selective mutism, as she is able to recite, and the more she wants to speak the more she is unable to). She wanders--her mother has always kept a rope tied between their wrists to not lose her. She has little fear and knows little about the world, but how much of this is from naivete and isolation is unclear. Rima has an intense and creative inner life--she creates and writes stories (though her writing may not be standard Arabic--flourished? Illuminated? Pictorial?); she reads and memorizes and can recite the Koran.

On a day trip to visit a friend, Rima's mother is shot and killed by a guard. Her brother comes to get Rima from the hospital, and her world gets more confusing and complicated as her brother is a fighter, and she must be tied at home to keep her safe.

I found this story fascinating, and I realize I have never considered how war creates even more difficulties for parents of disabled children/adults and their siblings. In Rima's case, she must be tied to keep her home, but be able to reach bed/toilet/safety from bombs. She cannot work or be sent to scavenge food, because she will wander. Her perspective, though is enlightening and logical--why hide from the bombs, there is nowhere safe. She observes everything.

A very interesting look at life inside this ongoing conflict. ( )

A short, strange, sad novel in translation about a young girl in the middle of the war in Syria who is in some way on the autism spectrum, though it's not explicitly stated anywhere—she doesn’t speak (but can sing the Qur'an), walks compulsively, and narrates her story in a strange and disjointed, but also affecting, way. It’s an odd book. I felt like it spun out a bit during the girl Rima's free associations—she's obsessed with The Little Prince, a sort of synesthetic philosophy of colors in her drawings, and Hassan, a friend of her brother's who rescues her from a chemical attack. But Rima's disassociated, often on the surface inappropriate worldview also worked as an apt commentary on war—how can anyone on the ground, caught in the middle of it, really make sense of it? What would actually be an "appropriate" reaction? Sometimes that kind of metaphor seems forced, but I thought it worked even when the style didn't always cohere. ( )

The Publisher Says: An ode to fantasy and beauty in the midst of war-torn Damascus

Rima, a young girl from Damascus, longs to walk, to be free to follow the will of her feet, but instead is perpetually constrained. She finds refuge in a fantasy world full of colored crayons, secret planets, and The Little Prince, reciting passages of the Qur’an like a mantra as everything and everyone around her is blown to bits. Since Rima hardly ever speaks, people think she’s crazy, but she is no fool—the madness is in the battered city around her.

One day while taking a bus through Damascus, a soldier opens fire and her mother is killed. Rima, wounded, is taken to a military hospital before her brother leads her to the besieged area of Ghouta—where, between bombings, she writes her story.

In Planet of Clay, Samar Yazbek offers a surreal depiction of the horrors taking place in Syria, in vivid and poetic language and with a sharp eye for detail and beauty.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

We needed to take two buses to reach {my mother's job} from our house, which was at the end of Jaramana Camp in southern Damascus. I am happy for you if you haven't heard of it.
–and–
Personally, I turn over the coffee tray and make it into a desk, then I pick up the blue pen which I found among the stacks of paper, and I begin. You must not set off before the sound has started. Don't stop unless you are faint from exhaustion, but it must be from exhaustion and not fear. If all this isn't done properly, I mean using the blue pen to play with words on a blank page, then my instructions will fail, the blank page won't like you, and the roar of the aeroplanes won't disappear.

The rational response to an irrational world, one filled with mortal danger, will always be different for a small child. When a small child is required to make the world make sense when it simply doesn't, such as in a war zone, there will arise adaptive responses that are in the long run maladaptive. And add in the probability of the person being neurodivergent from the get-go...well, what are the odds of that person reaching adulthood? Still less unscathed.

Rima's mother knows her daughter isn't the usual sort of child. She's got "her brains in her feet," meaning a mania for walking, walking, always walking if she can stay on her feet...in other words, a need to escape...and on one of her very first outings, so to speak, a group of well-meaning adults stop her and ask her all sorts of urgent questions...what's your name, where's your mother...that she simply can't process fast enough to answer. Thus is an elective mute created.

So now Rima's mother is living in a war zone with a manic, elective mute daughter. She does what any mother would do...she makes the medical rounds, seeking answers. Getting none, she does the thing mothers have done since the beginning of time: She improvises. She gets some rope and ties Rima to her wrist when she has to go out and, when the girl's too much of a woman for that to be safe, she ties her to their bed.

That sounds horrific to a Western person who's safe inside a house every night, with only police drones and cop cars to worry about. But think of this: How safe is a young woman on the streets here in your fat-and-happy country? You'll always teach her to be aware of the threat posed by Them. (You'll be filling in that space with the people you dislike the most, of course, but I assure you she's safer from Them than from the nice, entitled, self-satisfied boys in her school.) For someone with fewer resources than the poorest person in this country of ours, the solution fits the need admirably.

What it doesn't, can't do is prepare Rima for one of the personal calamities that even the mildest "police action" or "guerrilla war" engenders: The loss of a parent. In this case, an only parent...her father's never even been a presence for his absence to be felt. What this means is her world is effectively over. And yet her life goes on, in her mother's permanent absence and her brother's disappearance into the guerrillas' ranks.

What makes this such a perfect read for this moment is the Belarus-vs-Poland manufactured refugee crisis permeating the news cycle right now. It's a necessary and salutary reminder that the world's not in good shape, plague aside; the people, living breathing people, who are caught between two sets of disgusting racist piece-of-shit countries and who will continue to die of exposure as the world idly watches it happen, aren't going to get what they need any more than Rima did.

Mirabile dictu, Rima's brother shows up! He finds her! And they begin the refugee's eternal dance, the homeless and placeless and stateless state of being, of non-personhood. Of course to Rima it's not that way...she simply does. She lives. She is in touch with something utterly invaluable for a refugee: Her self. It is clear to her who she is, she is Rima and she reads, she sings the Qu'ran's sutras, she draws. It is a saving grace. What it isn't is easy for a storyteller to sell. She is simultaneously simple and sophisticated, ignorant and wise and way over her head.

Let me show you:

You will understand that I don't have enough time to explain to you about forgetting. Later, you can throw away whatever pages you want to. What matters to me is {the old caretaking woman} who wanted to understand how I knew how to use tartil in reciting the Qu'ran. Really, it was difficult to explain to her, because my tongue was stopped, and like {her} I don't understand much of what surrounds me.
–and–
I am a story, I too will disappear (or maybe I am with you now as you read my scattered words) like the Cheshire Cat did in the story of Alice.

That is some very sophisticated abstract thought for someone with the neurodivergence Rima has displayed...in the circumstances of her upbringing, I'd be impressed with that level of eloquent abstraction in a neurotypical young adult.

All in all, though, as a work of fiction, I was compelled by the story, by the character, by the narrative's timeliness and timelessness. I'm very impressed as this is the first work I've read by Author Yazbek. It is, as she has Rima say of her own storytelling, one of those "circular stories with intersecting centers which are only completed by retellings and new details."

The problem is reassembling my heart after the story ends....

This is a very special, very timely yet a timeless read...there is no realistic chance the subject matter will lose its relevance. It is a FINALIST for the 2021 Best Translated Literature category at the National Book Awards! The winner will be announced this evening. ( )

Planet of Clay, by Samar Yazbek, is one of those books that can break your heart, which makes it all the more worth reading. Set in contemporary Syria, Planet of Clay offers the tale of one young woman's experience of the civil war in that nation. Rima is an unusual narrator—she doesn't speak (by choice), but she sings the Qur'an to calm herself and others; she loves to draw and tell stories of her own devising and from books she's read; she is a restless and endless thinker whose mind takes her to places readers might not expect.

Rima is a compulsive walker. She is *compelled* to walk. As she explains to readers, her brain is in her feet. As a result, she's spent most of her young life tied by a length of rope to her mother's hand or to a solid object of some sort, so she can't roam too far. In the Damascus neighborhood where she lives, she can hear bombings, but they're distant. Then one day on a cross-city trip, her world is torn apart: her mother is shot and killed at one of the city's many check points; Rima is injured and stranded in a hospital that appears to function as a typical hospital, but is also a place where political prisoners are sent to heal between rounds of interrogation. Somehow, Rima's brother, who has become one of the fighters in the uprising again the nation's "President," finds her, and they set off to a rebel community some distance from Damascus. Now Rima doesn't just hear the bombings. She experiences and sees what they can do to frail human bodies.

Rima makes an exceptional narrator. She relates the horrors she's observing without self pity and escapes on flights of fancy, drawing and writing—sometimes in real life, sometimes in her imagination. There are times when her linguistic sophistication seems to fluctuate, and I'm not sure whether that was a deliberate choice by Yazbek. The book has moments when a reader wonders "how can she know about and describe x, when she doesn't know about and can't describe y?" But that's the Rima Yazbek gives us, and given the many facets to Rima's identity, a reader can embrace these discrepancies as part of the unusual person Rima is.

By letting Rima tell her own story, Yazbek takes readers into the Syrian civil war in ways news reportage can't. What we see is one small slice of that conflict, but we see that slice in detail under Rima's tutelage.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own. ( )