Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - Minor Detail

Like a fly caught in a spider’s web, I got trapped without even realizing it in the minor details of this story. The mundanity of this story is the great genius of this book and yet also the thing that makes it hard to read. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Horror upon horror.
While I was reading the first section, I wanted so badly to get past it, and onto the next section, but as soon as I did, I found myself retracing the story’s steps, wanting to go back to check the minor details, to compare them over and over again. The experience was deeply harrowing, and yet, I think I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time.

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hammerhead69's review

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adventurous dark informative reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

I was stuck between giving this book 5 stars or 1. Fantastic writing but the ending had me screaming!

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carojust's review

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challenging dark sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Adania Shibli shows us the darkest side of humanity, a reality we can't ignore, in painfully beautiful and stark writing.

The first half feels blurry, sweltering, full of smells and you feel yourself fearing, unsure what this character will do. He ends up doing the worst, and you see that you're witnessing hell.

The second half is a complete character, POV, timeline and tone shift, told through an autistic-leaning narrator who describes, in complete detail, her world as a Palestinian in recent years. With no sense of emotion, she talks about bombings that she works and sleeps through. We follow her as she retraces the events from the first half.

Shibli artfully weaves details and symbolism from both timelines into each other. It has a heartstopping effect, when you see that things haven't changed. The ending emphasizes this.

Please read this book.

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brigg_sy's review

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.75

The best book I do not recommend, it is incredibly sad and devastating. Such a tough, but great, read.

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akrreads's review

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dark mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? N/A
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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sabrinaleaf's review against another edition

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dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

2.5 ⭐️

I’m glad so many people enjoyed this one, unfortunately it wasn’t for me.

I thought the two point of views to be too disconnected to link them coherently. The second point of view was told in a “this happened, and then this happened” format, which I hate. All in all, I thought this book would have more of an impact than it actually did.

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readingpicnic's review

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4.5

I've had to sit with this book for a few days after finishing it so that I could try to do it justice in a review. The first half of the book centers around the subject of interest in the latter half of the book, the Palestinian girl who was gang-r*ped by Israeli soldiers and then murdered. The main character in the latter half of the book, a journalist, becomes interested in the girl's story after realizing that her death date was exactly 25 years before the MC's birth date, which caught her eye and generated a need to know more about this girl. The two parts of the book connect in pieces that the MC doesn't even realize because she doesn't have access to the information from the first half of the book, and it's essentially lost knowledge/history. She wishes to feel some connection to the girl who died while not realizing that some of her actions and sensory experiences are replicating what the girl went through, and this strong desire for connection coupled with the not knowing the connections do exist really devastated me. Some examples I wrote down were the dog howling/barking haunting the MC, and the dog also seemed to be a ghost at one point on page 94? There's also a scene on page 92 where the MC spills gasoline on herself after saying that she wishes she could stay in the area longer to get a clue as to what the girl endured, even though her reeking of gasoline for the remainder of the book is part of what the girl endured at the hands of the soldiers. In the first half of the book, the parts where the main soldier in charge was frantically crushing every bug in his room every night and was losing his mind a bit also fucked me up a lot. The imagery of barriers, both physical and metaphorical was very powerful in this book, especially with the way the MC worried over them in every interaction. One quote that really stuck out to me was "By the way, I hope I didn't cause any awkwardness when I mentioned the incident with the soldier, or the checkpoint, or when I reveal that we are living under occupation here" (56). I saw a TikTok explaining greenwashing before reading this book, and I'm really glad that I went into it with that context since I saw it come up again and again with mentions of Canada Park and Israeli soldiers saying that they were going to revitalize the land because Palestinians didn't know/didn't care to take care of it (not fucking true btw).
The last few pages of the book felt so aimless and wandering as the MC realizes that she truly cannot find the lost history of the girl and that her journey cannot have a satisfying ending because of all the barriers that prevent her from this knowledge. The ending of the book was shocking, but also not shocking due to the violence of this book and the almost expected violence by Israeli soldiers. The only part of this book that I wasn't a huge fan of was how it's written with every single action spelled out if that makes sense. Like, if a character got out of a vehicle, then every single part of that action was detailed from start to finish. I'm sure there's a reason for this method of storytelling, but maybe I can't see what it is in relation to the overarching themes of the book right now. Overall, this is such a necessary read.
Also, side note, I saw that someone added this to the Autistic Reads Challenge, and I agree that I was contemplating while reading this whether the main character of the second half was autistic and/or neurodivergent due to her thought processes, but I wasn't sure whether that was intentional on the author's part. I hesitate because she may process the world in these ways and think in these ways due to trauma and the circumstances in which she lives under occupation and has to be on high alert and think through interactions carefully, but acquired neurodivergence and disabilities due to trauma are valid, so I'm on the edge with this.

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twott123's review

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dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

5.0

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