Apr 15 2020

D-Day Through German Eyes by Holger Eckhertz

Holger Eckhertz’s grandfather, Dieter Eckhertz, was a wartime correspondent for German army publications such as Signal and Die Wehrmacht (The Army). Shortly before the Allied landings in Normandy, he visited that sector and interviewed quite a number of soldiers while preparing articles for the army’s magazines. After the war, he left journalism, but ten years later he did pursue one final project: finding men who had served in Normandy on June 6, 1944 and interviewing them about their impressions and experiences, their frames of mind and their motivations. The elder Eckhertz passed away in 1955 before he could shape the interviews into any final form.

D-Day Through German Eyes

In 2015 and 2016 the younger Eckhertz published the two books, collected in a single volume in the edition that I read, of interviews detailing, just as the title promises, D-Day through German eyes. After I had read the book and written most of this review, I saw that there are questions of whether it is true or not. Unfortunately, the most prominent places claiming that the book is fiction are outlets such as the New York Post and England’s Daily Mail that at the very least flirt with publishing fiction themselves on a regular basis. On the other hand, the book’s publisher, DTZ History Publications, does not appear to have any other titles on the market. Self-publishing is a totally legitimate way to get to the market in the 21st century, but coupled with the classic framing narrative and lack of any supporting apparatus, I think I have to at least express some uncertainty about the whole enterprise. A little bit of research shows that some reputable books have used Eckhertz’s volume as a source. Checking in on a couple of scholarly locations did not turn up any discussion of the book, which doesn’t say anything either way about the book’s veracity.

Given that I am in Berlin, I suppose that I could clear up this question definitively by checking records. If someone is willing to foot the bill, I could take a few days to do that. But for the rest of this review, I will presume that D-Day Through German Eyes is what it purports to be.

The first half of the book contains five interviews, one soldier from each of the five beaches where the Allies landed: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. The second half contains interviews with service members who had different functions: observation post, Luftwaffe pilot, military police, self-propelled assault gun crew, and so forth.

The soldiers’ experiences differed, but definite patterns emerged. The German army expected the Western Allies to invade France and establish a second front some time in the spring or summer of 1944. Up and down the coast, the soldiers were told from March or so onward that an attack could come at any time. Most of the soldiers were glad to be stationed in France because it was much less of a hardship than the Eastern front. Some of the men Eckhertz interviewed were veterans of previous campaigns and were transferred to France because they had been wounded and were not fit for more demanding duties. It is also true that by 1944, the fifth year of the war in Europe, the Third Reich was running low on manpower. Several accounts mention foreign conscript workers, often Poles or Russians, who were compelled to do construction work on German defenses in France.

The days preceding the invasion were like other days of the war, none of the men (and they were all men) interviewed mentions unusual levels of Allied activity until the night of June 5th. Nearly all of them say that the amount of planes flying over France that night was immense. Some saw signs of paratroopers landing, or of gliders bringing in airborne troops. At first light, soldiers who were stationed close to their sea caught an initial glimpse of the invading armada. To a man, they were astonished at its size. The account of Henrik Naube, a corporal in the infantry at Omaha Beach, is typical:

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/04/15/d-day-through-german-eyes-by-holger-eckhertz/

Apr 13 2020

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

Come for the Alan Turing fanfic! Stay for the… um. Oh, dear. I knew going into this that it would be terrible, but I hadn’t realized exactly how terrible till I finished this utter nonsense of a 21st century novel.

Ordinarily, I like to just review a book without taking into consideration anything the author might have said outside of the work. If it can’t speak for itself, then it’s not as good as it ought to be, after all. In most cases, when I’m urged by a fan to read an author interview after I’ve excoriated the work, it’s because said interview is meant to answer questions the book does not, and somehow vindicate the lapse (note: it never does.) In this case, I’ll reference the much derided Guardian interview with Ian McEwan to explain why this novel is so bad, and how his words only confirmed what I suspected about his motives for writing such a flaccid piece of self-aggrandization. At first, I thought it was weird that the interview was less about Machines Like Me than it was about Mr McEwan himself, but then I realized it was of a piece with this miserable book, with their shared odd airs throughout of how lucky science fiction and technology and particularly the field of Artificial Intelligence were to have Britain’s Novelist turn his Discerning Eye to the subgenres.

Total bollocks, of course, because nothing in this book is a revelation to anyone with a working knowledge of sci-fi, which includes the millions of people who don’t even read the stuff but have watched, say, episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, or a Terminator movie (the last one was hilarious, btw. Arnie still rules.) MLM is set in an alternate history 1980s Britain where Alan Turing never committed suicide and thus laid the foundations for technological marvels like cellphones and autonomously driven automobiles to be commonplace by the time the Falklands War/Invasion set off. The politics are mostly distracting and seem more like an excuse for Mr McEwan to get his digs in, deserved or otherwise, where he may; given how they make up so much of the book, it’s completely off-putting that they are then of little consequence to anything that happens in the narrative. And for all that this book slobbers over poor Mr Turing, who I agree died far too soon and in the most depressing of circumstances, it also makes him out to be an asshole. But maybe that’s just because he has to deal with our protagonist, the shiftless and clueless yet unceasingly superior Charlie Friend.

Charlie is a day trader with a chequered past. When he comes into a large inheritance, he impulsively decides to spend it on one of the 25 newly rolled out Adams and Eves: lifelike androids that are meant to be “companions” or somesuch nonsense (they’re all anatomically correct, so you can guess what they’ll actually be used for.) Since his Adam is meant to be programmed by him for personality traits, but since — in one of his few moments of self-awareness — Charlie doesn’t just want to make a clone of himself, he offers the opportunity to his upstairs neighbor, Miranda, to help him choose half of Adam’s personality, hoping it will draw him and Miranda closer, as he’s been in love with her for a while. Long story short, Adam falls in love with Miranda then winds up fucking everything up because of his “logic” circuits, then when Charlie tries to shut him down, Alan Turing gets mad.

What I can’t fathom is how a machine whose programming allows it to fall in love, that least rational of feelings, can also misunderstand justice and obligation as thoroughly as Adam does. No one can gainsay that there is a natural, if rough, justice to what Miranda did to Peter, so Adam’s insistence on following the letter of the law — when he with his alleged depth and breadth of learning in history and literature knows that the law is often unjust, and when everyone else is ready to put it all in the past — just seems like pedantic nonsense, especially given the book’s over-long ruminations on achieving ends in logic problems (we get it, Mr McEwan, you did your research. My undergraduate degree applauds you.) It’s also rubbish that he only returned the thirty quid to Charlie given that his upkeep cost far, far more than that, and you’d think he’d at least take that into consideration given how “broad” his “consciousness” was. Ugh, the entire thing was so insufferable. Mr McEwan plays fast and loose with logic in order to scaremong and draw false parallels. I’m sure he meant to be thought-provoking, but honestly this was just provoking nonsense.

Anyway, I put off reading it as long as I could because the reviews weren’t wrong, and I didn’t want to diminish my opinion of the author of one of the best books ever written, the chillingly brilliant Atonement. Granted, I thought Saturday, the only other book of his I’ve read, was over-hyped, tho I’ll acknowledged that when I first reviewed that novel, I was also far too generous with my praise of what, in retrospect, strikes me as banal. Perhaps a decade on, I will also revise my opinion of MLM, this time for the better, but given that it currently reads like second-rate genre trash from the 1970s — I mean, honestly there is nothing innovative about anything in this book and I am baffled by how disconnected its boosters must be from popular culture of the last forty years — I sincerely doubt it.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/04/13/machines-like-me-by-ian-mcewan/

Apr 07 2020

Eden by Tim Lebbon

Y’all, I’m not the outdoorsy type due to a huge respect for how insignificant we as individual human beings are in the great face of Nature, so when I read that this book was about a team of adventure racers illegally trespassing on a nature reserve essentially for kicks, I knew this would not end well for them, no matter how “leave no trace” they were planning to be. Nature does not care about intentions. Nature will kill a person in a million different ways and I’m saying that from real-life experience, not simply because Eden is a eco-horror novel where one can generally expect a fairly high body count.

Eden, in this book, is also the name of the oldest of the nature preserves formed with the forced evacuation of all human residents, to give the planet a fighting chance at restoring its green lungs and, thus, continuing to provide a livable environment for the majority of humanity. Set in a distant-ish future of at least half a century from now, the thirteen nature preserves the world over are zealously guarded by the Zeds, as they’re called, a paramilitary unit officially named the Zone Defense Forces. Of course, that’s exactly the kind of challenge that thrill seekers like Jenn and her team, including her dad Dylan and boyfriend Aaron, live for. They’ve traversed many of the Virgin Zones and other treacherous territories together, as have dozens of other underground crews, but Eden remains the prize. No adventure racing team has managed to enter and exit Eden and live to tell the tale.

That in itself might be enough impetus for Jenn’s team, but as the novel progresses, we discover that several of the team members have their own secret purposes for wanting to be there. Of course, Nature doesn’t care. And Nature, having been left to itself for the longest time, is about to show them that they’re not welcome on their own terms.

Perhaps bizarrely, the main takeaway I got from this novel is that Humanity not only has a responsibility to not disengage from Nature, but must also continue researching its abilities and importance, lest terrible things be allowed to fester and grow without our oversight. I hesitate to think that that was Tim Lebbon’s aim in writing this novel, but I am always biased towards the comforts of civilization, with perhaps a naive belief in the power of the human spirit to do the right thing, in the end. Eden could just as easily be read as a grim paean to the supremacy of nature over all our efforts, however well-meaning. Personally, I believe that there was some triumph of the human spirit on display, even though a partnership where Nature has the upper hand seemed perhaps more an accurate summation of events.

That’s the beauty of Eden the novel, that what’s essentially an action-adventure gone horribly awry into eco-horror is so open to moral and philosophical interpretation, with few wrong answers. Another thing I loved about this book is that, unlike too many of its ilk, it fully explains what the Monster is, or at least gives you more than enough to fill in any blanks. Our human characters are also well-realized, with Gee probably being my favorite. Eden would make for a really terrific movie, one that my squeamish, domestic-loving self would probably never be able to watch. I definitely look forward to reading more of Mr Lebbon’s work tho.

We at TFC have been given the opportunity to interview him, so look out for that on April 16th! In the meantime, check out some of the other stops on Titan Books’ Eden blog tour with the handy infographic above!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/04/07/eden-by-tim-lebbon/

Apr 05 2020

A Bad Day for Sunshine (Sunshine Vicram #1) by Darynda Jones

That was both fun and surprisingly heartfelt!

Sunshine Vicram has just returned to the New Mexico town of Del Sol where she grew up, after being elected sheriff in a race she wasn’t even aware she’d entered. Her parents, Curtis and Elaine Freyr, were convinced she’d be the best person for the job and “managed” her entire campaign, the animosity of the prior sheriff and the town mayor notwithstanding. So Sunshine moves back with her teenage daughter Auri, and quickly finds herself involved in all the weirdness of her home town. Luckily, she has her best friend since childhood, Deputy Quincy Cooper, to help her get into the swing of things.

But not even a supportive local network can brace her for the disappearance of a local teen, one who’d made friends with Auri before vanishing into thin air. Sybil St Aubin had had premonitions of her own abduction and murder on her fifteenth birthday, premonitions no one had taken seriously until now. When the investigations into Sybil’s disappearance turn up leads on the traumatic series of events that had originally caused Sunshine herself to flee town over a decade earlier, things start to get pretty sticky for our new sheriff.

There were so many twists and turns as Darynda Jones expertly weaves in a myriad of subplots, setting up for a really interesting series to come. Never fear, tho, the main story is more than amply completed — a pet peeve of mine is when mystery series don’t resolve their main vs overarching series plots per book, a pitfall this novel deftly avoids. I did figure out whodunnit when Ms Jones dropped two ginormous clues, and I have a fairly good idea where she’s going with Levi Ravinder’s involvement in Sunshine’s abduction as a teenager, but I’m very interested in finding out if I’m as right about the latter as I was the former. I also enjoyed the fact that this series debut, written from the alternating viewpoints of Sunshine and Auri — who share a delightfully sassy familial attitude to life while sounding like their own distinct personalities — feels like equal parts Brooklyn 99 and Veronica Mars: good snarky fun.

That said, I could have done with less of people “laughing softly” all the time, and the phrase “making X great again” — no matter how ironically used — will always sound like a racist dog whistle to me. Also, how did all these gori wind up having Indian last names?! Perhaps that’s a question that will be answered in future installments, which I’m definitely looking forward to reading!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/04/05/a-bad-day-for-sunshine-sunshine-vicram-1-by-darynda-jones/

Apr 04 2020

The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key

Re-reading The Forgotten Door was a gift to my third-grade self. It’s the first book of any length that I remember reading, and the cover was still lodged in my brain after all of these years, not that I would judge a book that way, no. I remembered the barest bones of the story: a boy falls through a hidden and forgotten door from his planet to Earth; he is in danger here, but finds some people who help him; he can “make his feet light” and leap as if wearing seven-league boots; I thought that maybe he had some other extraordinary abilities as well. I did not remember exactly how it turned out, but I was fairly certain there was a happy ending.

Forgotten Door

I had already noticed a wintertime slowness to my reading this year, and that was before one death and another medical emergency in the extended family, to say nothing of the global pandemic. Picking up The Forgotten Door was a way to begin again at the beginning and see whether memory matched the material. I hoped that the Suck Fairy had not paid a visit.

The bare bones of the story that had stayed with me all that time were right, and sturdy bones they were for Key’s quick narrative. Little Jon gets distracted watching a meteor shower, takes a wrong step backwards and — “It happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, that Little Jon’s cry was almost instantly cut short as the blackness closed over him. No one knew the hole was there. It hadn’t been there the day before, and in the twilight no one had noticed it.” (Ch. 1) — falls to Earth. He hits his head as he falls, loses consciousness, and with it much of his memory.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/04/04/the-forgotten-door-by-alexander-key/

Mar 29 2020

Five Dark Fates (Three Dark Crowns #4) by Kendare Blake

This is the end of the series and what a strange and terrific end it is for the triplet queens of Fennbirn, doomed to fight each other to the death for a crown that not all of them will want. As this final entry opens, Arsinoe is attempting to bring Jules back to sanity, only to discover that Mirabella has fled the rebel camp for the Queen Crowned Katharine’s side. The extremely annoying Emilia insists that Mirabella is a traitor. Little does she know that Mirabella is more concerned with figuring out what’s wrong with Katharine than in gaining power for anyone, least of all herself. Mirabella, Arsinoe and Katharine are, in fact, all in agreement about their preferred outcome, but the island has other ideas, and many will die before a new dawn may rise over their beloved Fennbirn.

So, the good: the queens went out the way they wanted, more or less. I cried buckets at each devastating sacrifice. I also enjoyed Kendare Blake’s interrogation of monarchy and ritual and meaning, and her court politics are, as always, outstanding. I also greatly enjoyed her depiction of all the complexities of love.

The less good: how the aftermath was dealt with. I do not for one second believe that after all that, invading ships from the mainland wouldn’t overrun Fennbirn in a matter of months. I’m still not entirely sure what structure of government was left, since no one wants to govern and the Goddess seems to have basically shrugged and said “eh, well, at least my experiment worked for a few centuries.”

I think that’s pretty much my brain demanding more stories in this universe from Ms Blake, tho. Fennbirn is a fascinating place peopled by strong personalities, and I don’t feel that Five Dark Fates ended at a tidy place for any of Ms Blake’s creations, besides the three queens. This book goes by at a gallop, and some things, like the portent of the old temple and the whole deal with the Legion curse, fall to the wayside, which would be fine if this weren’t the final book. So… hopefully, this isn’t the final book? It would feel like something of a disservice to the fallen queens and all who came before them if it were.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/03/29/five-dark-fates-three-dark-crowns-4-by-kendare-blake/

Mar 27 2020

Salz im Blut by Andreas Neumeister

In the early 2000s, I am led to understand, the editors of the Süddeutsche Zeitung found that the paper had more printing capacity than was being used to put out the daily news. One way to set that capacity to productive use was with a foray into book publishing. The newspaper’s staff put together a list of 50 great novels of the 20th century, offered them in attractive editions at an attractive price (initially €4.90 for a hardback) and released them at a rate of one per week for the better part of a year. The list was a good one, and one of the cleverest things that the editors did was to select 50 great ones rather than attempt to agree on the 50 greatest. There were also some glaring gaps on the list, which made it good for arguing. I’ve read around 35 of them by now, although some, e.g., The Great Gatsby, I read long ago and in English.

Salz im Blut

The project must also have been a financial success because the Süddeutsche followed it with selections of children’s books, mysteries, a second set of 50 great novels of the 20th century, books that represent great cities of the world, and the series of 20 books to which Salz im Blut belongs: München erlesen. The phrase means “Selected Munich” and it carries connotations of a sommelier selecting a fine vintage. Salz im Blut is the seventh in the collection that I have begun, again by the unedifying principle of generally shortest to longest. (It may be quite a while before I get to the second volume in the set, Lion Feuchtwanger’s 878-page Erfolg.)

The jacket copy for Salz im Blut (Salt in the Blood) sounds promising, “Munich in the seventies and eighties from the unusual perspective of the ethnology student Erich Nachleger … On only supposedly known territory, he remains a discoverer, adding observations from the subculture and found bits of the past to the official picture of Munich.” Freddie Mercury loved the Munich of the 1970s, Dire Straits sang about the city’s gay underground in “Les Boys.” Given the long shadow of the 1930s and 1940s, though, the later decades are not a period often seen in writing about the city. Salz im Blut ought to be an engrossing, engaging entry into the era.

And yet. The first time I started the book, I got to page 30 or so and set it down in favor of something speedier. I picked it up and couldn’t remember who was who or what was what, so I started again from the beginning, which wasn’t all that many pages away. This time I have gotten to page 44. I set it down about three weeks ago, and now I only have vague notions of various people passing through its pages. I am reasonably sure that Erich Nachleger is the narrator, but I couldn’t tell anyone much about him at all, except that he doesn’t use dialog, writes in paragraphs that each tend to be two or three pages long, and has a thing about a weird post-WWII notion to relocate Munich entirely instead of rebuilding it. It’s not so much that I don’t care what happens to these people, it’s that I have no idea who these people are at all anymore.

Maybe later in the book there is a brilliant portrait of the city as a collection of young hedonists. Maybe Neumeister’s vision is so singular as to reward wading through the undifferentiated prose. Maybe this is a hidden gem that can only really be appreciated looking back at the whole work. I have no idea. I do know that it’s not a book for me, not now, not after two tries. The other five in the München erlesen set that I have recently read (I read the Thomas Mann book when the series was first published) all interested me much more than Salz im Blut.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/03/27/salz-im-blut-by-andreas-neumeister/

Mar 24 2020

The Last Human by Zack Jordan

Sarya was raised to believe that she is the last human in all the known universe by her adoptive mother, Shenya the Widow, a member of a matriarchal arachnid-like race of killing machines. On Watchtower, the space station where they make their home, Sarya passes as a low-intelligence member of a species bearing a resemblance to humanity, even as she wistfully researches what became of her people. Humans, she learned early on, were deemed too dangerous to live by the universe-spanning conglomeration that connects all the (other) known space-faring civilizations, and were thus exterminated. Sometimes 17 year-old Sarya feels so ordinary that she finds it hard to believe that humans could possibly be more dangerous than, say, her mother, but as adulthood approaches and she faces the prospect of a lifetime of menial work and being treated like a barely sentient being by almost everyone around her, she starts to wish for something more.

Enter Observer. A planetary intelligence who has eschewed connection to the Network that governs civilization, He offers Sarya the adventure of a lifetime, promising that He can lead her to what’s left of humanity. Sarya accepts but things quickly go awry, and she finds herself a pawn in a game between intelligences she has little hope of fathoming, much less beating. Being human, however, she’s not going down without a fight.

Despite being a rollicking, fast-paced space opera, The Last Human was also a deft if overt allegory for life and progress, whether of individuals or entire societies. Because Sarya, as our heroine, must learn and grow and become a better person, there’s definitely a huge chunk in there which mirrors most people’s adolescent impulse towards libertarian exceptionalist nonsense — a phase which fortunately most people subsequently grow out of. I was actually concerned, while reading the book, that Sarya might not and that I would have to rate this book poorly for being intellectual garbage, but Zack Jordan assuredly pulls the novel back round to an affirmation of good sense. Frankly, it got a little uncomfortable for me till he did, as I’m the kind of person who gets irritated when others are dumb on purpose.

That said, this was a surprisingly layered and highly ambitious look at sentience and evolution that could never have been written in any other genre. Mr Jordan is doing some really intellectually intricate, challenging stuff here that might not be every reader’s speed. I think he does linger a little too long on the bits where Sarya is under Observer’s sway, but that’s also where a lot of the action-y/grotesque bits are, so I can understand why he does so even if my sensibilities would prefer he hadn’t. This isn’t an easy book by any means, but it’s ultimately a rewarding, thought-provoking journey, with lessons that apply to any person’s daily life, examined or otherwise.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/03/24/the-last-human-by-zack-jordan/

Mar 23 2020

Girls Of Paper And Fire (Girls Of Paper And Fire #1) by Natasha Ngan

I unreservedly loved the first half of this book. I’ve had a problem recently with books claiming to represent the various of my identities and doing a pretty shitty job of it, so it was something of a relief to see how meticulous Natasha Ngan and the team behind Girls Of Paper And Fire were about promoting this novel as being based on her Malaysian-Chinese heritage through her mom. I was further delighted by the world-building, with its lovely references to recognizably Malaysian touchstones amidst the fantasy trappings. Ms Ngan does a beautiful job of representing our shared heritage and I am forever grateful to her for doing this.

The story itself follows Lei, the 17 year-old daughter of herbalists who is cruelly taken from her home by an ambitious general to be presented as a gift to the Demon King. There are three castes in the world of Ikhara: the fully human Paper, the mostly human but with demon/animal features Steel, and the mostly demon but still recognizably humanoid Moon. The Moon caste have been in power since the Night Wars that rent the kingdom, and the Demon King rules over all. Every year, eight women of the Paper caste are selected as his concubines. Lei is cast in with them.

Some of her fellow concubines are kind to her but some are awful, and then there’s Wren. As she and Lei fall in love, they must hide their relationship from a court where they are seen only as belongings of the King, making each shared kiss an act of treason. But Wren is hiding other secrets as well, secrets that could set their entire world on fire.

Brilliant premise, and really great first half execution. But then Lei goes from being spunky and relatable to hysterically demanding to know all Wren’s secrets, accusing her of lack of trust, and I just had horrible flashbacks to every crappy show and movie I’ve ever seen where this dumb “if you don’t tell me all your secrets, you don’t really love me” shit is thrown in to add drama to the proceedings. Every time Wren caved in to the emotional manipulation, I liked Lei (and respected Wren) a whole lot less. And Lei’s disgust when Wren kills someone who was trying to kill them first felt so wholly manufactured for the dramz that I could hardly even take her seriously from then on. It also felt like the careful control Ms Ngan had over her narrative began to fall apart, as plot points felt more hastily spliced in during the second half of the book, culminating in scenes and revelations that actually had me rolling my eyes. I think the worst was when her pendant finally opened. Given Wren’s stirring speech earlier about Lei’s drive to fight for what was right, Lei’s interpretation of what she found in the pendant felt almost like an insult, both to Wren’s belief in her and to the readers’ intelligence.

There’s so much great representation here in terms of culture and sexuality that it’s such a disappointment when the characterization and plot just go askew like that. I’m not entirely closed to the idea of reading the sequel, but even from the preview included in my Kindle copy, I’m disappointed by Lei’s continuing dumbassery. This is one of those series where I Want To Believe it’ll get better, and am hoping to be persuaded by others who have read further books.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/03/23/girls-of-paper-and-fire-girls-of-paper-and-fire-1-by-natasha-ngan/

Mar 19 2020

A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza

What a lot of fatuous nonsense.

First of all, let’s talk about the marketing for this novel. It’s being touted as the story of a Muslim Indian-American family and sure yes, but also it’s a very specific brand of Muslim, a conservative Shi’ah that’s as bizarre to me, raised a mainstream Sunni Muslim, as the traditions of the Church Of Mormon might be to the rest of Protestant Christianity. I’m not saying this to invalidate any of the belief systems on display (and I did very much appreciate the emphasis on Allah’s mercy and compassion) but there’s a bunch of stuff in here that emphasized to me the reason most Muslims are Sunni and only grudgingly accept the Shi’ah adherents as co-religionists, if at all. It’s a bit like marketing a book about a devoutly Catholic family in Northern Ireland as a book about a Christian family in Great Britain: technically correct but completely missing the point.

But, you know, all cultures/religions contain multitudes, and the American reading public can hardly expect to understand the difference between the sects (which, to me as a Sunni, feels like aggressive erasure but whatever) so it’s fine that the only Sunni in the book is a good dude who’s often baffled by but respecting of Shi’ah customs. Actually, I’m kinda glad that this book isn’t about Sunni Muslims because there is so much absurd religion-adjacent wallowing that I’d feel embarrassed if it were my people doing it.

So this book is about a family of five: dad Rafiq, mom Layla, oldest daughter Hadia, middle child Huda and troubled baby of the family Amar. Most of the book comes from the viewpoint of, in order, Hadia, Amar and Layla, with Rafiq getting the entire end section to herself. The family order here mirrors my own birth family, and even tho I think my younger sister by far the brattiest of us with her perpetual attention-seeking middle child syndrome, I was super annoyed that poor Huda didn’t get any viewpoint chapters. Tho this was likely because her personality was not built for wallowing, and therefore of little interest to this author.

Anyway, Hadia is your typical overachieving daughter while Amar is a total shitshow that everyone babies because he’s the boy. Rafiq tries to discipline him and this automatically makes him the bad guy. You guys, how a story about a conservative Muslim family had me rooting for the patriarch figure is beyond me. But maybe it’s because Hadia, who you’d think I would totally identify with, actually thinks like this about an heirloom watch that her dad proudly gifted to her for academic achievement:

She had taken from [Amar] what, in another life, would have belonged to him by birth. She had worked hard to be as valuable as any son. Her betrayals to her brother were scattered throughout the years, but perhaps being given this watch was the culmination of them all.

Pump the fucking brakes, girlfriend. Your dad can see that your brother — who wasn’t at all upset about the watch going to his sister, btw — wouldn’t appreciate the watch the way you would, and your response is to bemoan the fact that none of the men in your family are outright misogynists? GTFOH. Hadia is obsessed with tradition but only in the crappiest, most tiresome ways. She refuses an arranged marriage, instead falling in love with Tariq, the afore-mentioned Sunni Muslim. Good for her, right? But at their traditional Shi’ah marriage ceremony (half of which was straight up bonkers to me as a Southeast Asian Sunni,) she has the following thoughts about the mirror ritual

It was a ritual that had come about in the days when one never even saw the face of their spouse before they were wed. It had been how her grandparents on both sides had first seen one another. By the time her parents had gotten married, it was a formality; her father had visited her mother’s home twice. They had never spoken in private but had seen each other from across the room. Now that it was Hadia’s turn, it was no more than a performance–she had memorized Tariq’s freckle beneath his eyebrow, the spot on his beard that grew in a swirl. Each generation lost touch bit by bit. By the time it was her children’s turn, would there even be a point?

The point of tradition is that there’s sometimes no fucking point besides honoring how your ancestors did something! You do it because it’s pretty and/or or it reminds you of your heritage, and that is more than enough. How a woman who deliberately dodged an arranged marriage can then moon over the need to acclimatize two newlyweds to faces they’d never seen before is beyond me.

Anyway, if you’re into that bullshit, then you’ll love this book! If you’re into internalized misogyny, then you’ll also love this book! Like, if you thought Hadia’s thought processes repulsive, wait till you read Layla’s! And while I have some sympathy for Amar, he just keeps making bad choices, and everyone acts like it’s because his daddy didn’t love him enough. Look, I’ve known enough addicts to understand that you can’t beat addiction if you constantly blame others for your shortcomings. Rafiq does the fucking best he can. He’s not a perfect parent: he’s definitely religious and conservative with a temper that mainly manifests in yelling at his kids, but he deserves better than Amar being a selfish jackhole and Hadia being an enabling self-hater. In my mind, he goes off to live with Huda in Arizona and finds a peaceful happily ever after, with or without Amar. It’s the least he deserves after being unjustly blamed for every other crappy thing that happens in these pages.

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