I'm
a little torn on this one. The story, which revolved around a Syrian
couple caught up in the travel ban against Muslim countries back in
2017, definitely had a lot of potential. In fact, the story actually
started off strong -- I was immediately sympathetic to Sama and Hadi's
situation and was absorbed in how things would play out for them.
However, a few chapters in, the story seemed to unravel a bit in terms
of plot and some things started to not make much sense. Even so, I
continued to stick with it, as I felt the characters were well-drawn and
their story was an important one to tell. Indeed, what happened to
both of the characters was heartbreaking and in detailing their plight,
especially the various injustices that they had to endure, I felt that
the author, Yara Zgheib, did a good job making the story emotionally
resonant, to the point that I couldn't help but root for the characters,
even if there were times when I didn't agree with their actions.
With
all that said though, I did have some issues with this one that made
the reading experience a little bit of a struggle for me. The issues
were mostly with the structure and the writing, which made parts of the
story confusing and hard to follow. Structure-wise, the story was
mostly told through Sama's and Hadi's alternating perspectives, which
wasn't unusual, but the mode kept switching too, between first person,
second person, and third person points-of-view, sometimes all in the
same chapter, which to me, was a bit too much. In terms of the
dialogue, that too was done in a way that was different -- some of the
dialogue was in quotes while some of it wasn't and it seemed to be
randomly done throughout the story (at least I wasn't able to figure out
any particular rhyme or reason to it). I had actually read Zgheib's debut novel The Girls at 17 Swann Street back in 2019 and while
I liked that book quite a bit, I remember mentioning in my review at
the time that the structure was odd because some scenes were written in
ways that were intertwined to the point that it was hard to tell where
one moment ended and the next one began. Interestingly enough, I saw
nearly the exact same structure issue with this book as well, which
leads me to think that perhaps this is just the way this author writes?
As
if that weren't enough though, the prose throughout the story was what I
would describe as overly "flowery" and metaphorical -- normally I
wouldn't have a problem with this, but in this case, it was way overdone
and had the effect of making the story too abstract -- to the point
that, with some sections, I would finish reading several pages and have
no idea what just happened. I have nothing against flowery language and
actually feel that it works well in certain situations, but it can't be
at the expense of the story and the plot, which was what happened here,
as I felt like I kept having to unravel the metaphorical language and
interpret what the author was trying to say -- this distracted from the
story and also made the overall reading experience too exhausting for
me.
One
more thing about the structure that confused me was how there were
excerpts from what looked to be a paper about bird migratory patterns
(which I'm going to assume was Sama's dissertation, since the backstory
scenes indicated that she studied anthropology and wrote a paper on
birds) scattered throughout the story. While I get that the author
likely included those snippets as an analogy for the immigrant
experience (since the entire premise of the story was about the
immigration system in the U.S. after all), I honestly didn't see the
relevance from the technical details provided in those sections. After a
few times, I ended up skipping those sections and not even reading
them, since they were unnecessary to the understanding of the rest of
the story.
Overall,
I think this one had the potential to be a powerful story, but the
not-so-good execution (with its odd structure and overuse of
metaphorical language) made the narrative come across as too fragmented
and disjointed. As I mentioned earlier, there were some parts of the
story that I felt were done well and this was definitely a story worth
telling in my opinion (which is why I didn't rate this one lower than I
probably would have in other circumstances). I feel like this was one
of those instances where an inexperienced author tried to do way too
much -- i.e. play with structure and language, employ as many literary
devices as possible, etc., while trying to write about a heavy,
controversial topic that naturally required incorporating social and
political commentary as well. Instead of having the intended effect, it
ended up feeling like the story was all over the place.
It
looks like this one has been a mixed bag so far in terms of reviews, so
I would suggest checking out some of the other reviews to get a better
feel for whether this is one you would want to pick up, since some of
the things that bothered me about the structure might not be an issue
for others.
Received ARC from Atria Books via Edelweiss.
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