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3.71 AVERAGE
3.71 AVERAGE
This was about a young girl in Syria. It started being cute, she loved the little prince and imagined his painting everywhere, but started going darker and darker as the war went on. I enjoyed it, the way it was constructed, but it could be considered emptionally manipulative at points.
This book will break your heart into smithereens.
That is literally all I wanted to say in this review because the book left me heartbroken and speechless. How can something so terribly, utterly sad, be written in such a beautiful way? You will probably shed many tears of utter sadness, but not be able to put the book down, even though you can probably imagine the outcome.
Hope IS a thing though, even through the darkest of moments, and we experience hope while reading, just as Rima, the main character, continues to hope and dream as she writes.
Rima is a young girl who lives in Damascus with her mother and brother. She decided at the age of 4 to not use her tongue, and is considered a mute by many people as she only speaks to recite or sing verses of the Qur’an. She also spends her time being attached by ties to her mother or to a pole, as she cannot control her feet: when she experiences freedom she cannot stop herself from walking, running away. When her mother is mistakenly shot at a checkpoint Rima’s life changes forever, and the narrative is her story of war, sadness, and death amidst bombs, chemical attacks, and loss.
Rima writes stories in circles, past and present woven together, each circle part of the next one. She sees everything in color, and paints the world she sees in her words, giving us a view of destruction that is very different but equally, if not more, as painful as a video or photograph. I have always loved how gorgeously Samar Yazbek writes, and Planet of Clay is no exception to this. It’s hard to explain just how much this novel will affect you - Rima’s narrative is both bleak and colorful, and she continues to write, to observe, and to leave her legacy, all the while suffering from the affects of a chemical bomb and losing everything she has ever known. I can’t recommend this book enough. Just be prepared to be devastated, but to also hopefully feel the push to do more to help in any way you can.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
That is literally all I wanted to say in this review because the book left me heartbroken and speechless. How can something so terribly, utterly sad, be written in such a beautiful way? You will probably shed many tears of utter sadness, but not be able to put the book down, even though you can probably imagine the outcome.
Hope IS a thing though, even through the darkest of moments, and we experience hope while reading, just as Rima, the main character, continues to hope and dream as she writes.
Rima is a young girl who lives in Damascus with her mother and brother. She decided at the age of 4 to not use her tongue, and is considered a mute by many people as she only speaks to recite or sing verses of the Qur’an. She also spends her time being attached by ties to her mother or to a pole, as she cannot control her feet: when she experiences freedom she cannot stop herself from walking, running away. When her mother is mistakenly shot at a checkpoint Rima’s life changes forever, and the narrative is her story of war, sadness, and death amidst bombs, chemical attacks, and loss.
Rima writes stories in circles, past and present woven together, each circle part of the next one. She sees everything in color, and paints the world she sees in her words, giving us a view of destruction that is very different but equally, if not more, as painful as a video or photograph. I have always loved how gorgeously Samar Yazbek writes, and Planet of Clay is no exception to this. It’s hard to explain just how much this novel will affect you - Rima’s narrative is both bleak and colorful, and she continues to write, to observe, and to leave her legacy, all the while suffering from the affects of a chemical bomb and losing everything she has ever known. I can’t recommend this book enough. Just be prepared to be devastated, but to also hopefully feel the push to do more to help in any way you can.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
‘We wait, everyday, for the bombs to fall on us.’
In April 2013, Syrian Government forces laid siege to eastern Ghouta, which lasted 5 years and continued even after a UN ceasefire resolution in early February 2018. Exiled Syrian journalist Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, brilliantly translated by [a:Leri Price|6727952|Leri Price|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] (for which it was shortlisted for the National Book Award in Translation), is brutal and poetic tale of the horrors of the Syrian Civil War told through the eyes of Rima, a young girl who spends much of the novel hiding from the bombings. Rima, who has chosen to never speak, has been deemed to suffering from mental illness yet through her writings we see that perhaps it is her mind that is the most rational tool in an irrational world. ‘I’m writing to you from my cellar, my secret new planet,’ she tells us, and through her love of literature she reconstructs what she understands of the death and dread around her into fantasy with frequent allusions to her favorite stories, [b:The Little Prince|157993|The Little Prince|Antoine de Saint-Exupéry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1367545443l/157993._SY75_.jpg|2180358] and [b:Alice's Adventures In Wonderland|24611820|Alice's Adventures in Wonderland|Anna Bond|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1426117422l/24611820._SX50_.jpg|55548884]. Yazbek looks horror directly in the eye through astonishingly poetic language and imagery, highlighting the brutality of war and the ways the most vulnerable suffer most in this passionately delivered story of survival and beauty in a world blown to pieces.
‘How could you escape dying if not by standing in front of it? Or at least looking straight at it?’
Samar Yazbek was forced into exile in Paris with her daughter in 2011 after being detained multiple times by Syria’s secret police under the Bashar al-Assad regime. However, she began clandestine returns into Syria to write about the descent into revolution and the early days of the uprisings, which she published in her 2012 book [b:The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria|25838272|The Crossing My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria|Samar Yazbek|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1441556772l/25838272._SY75_.jpg|43272226], for which she was awarded a PEN/Pinter Prize for an “International writer of courage”. In an interview with DAWN, she says ‘I felt it was my duty as an intellectual and as a writer to write the truth of what had happened in Syria. The victims needed to have this voice.’ She also founded Women Now for Development, an NGO for empowering women in Syria. ‘Writing nonfiction actually was more like an exile from my true self,’ she says, ‘ I was exiled both from my land and from my true self—from my identity as a novelist.’ With Planet of Clay she says ‘when I started writing this novel, it was like getting back to my true land.’ And what a land of literature it is, with both terror and compassion pouring out of every page.
‘Don’t think that what you are reading is a novel,’ Rima writes at the start of the novel, ‘what I am writing is the truth and I am doing it to understand what happened.’ Non-verbal Rima sees the world much differently than others, and because her habit of uncontrollably walking away she has spent her whole life either tied to her mother’s wrist or tied in the school library in which her mother works, being cared for by Sitt Soud, a loving librarian. In fact, Rima sees the library as one of her ‘special planets’, a safe space inspired by the planets in [b:The Little Prince|157993|The Little Prince|Antoine de Saint-Exupéry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1367545443l/157993._SY75_.jpg|2180358], which really sold me on loving this novel. She has a love for words but says ‘it is difficult to form relationships between words and reality’. She prefers images, often drawing but has a gift for beautiful writing and believes ‘every adjective in language is a painting.’ Her mind is always racing, and often in many directions, which makes the narrative quite circuitous, crisscrossing the timeline and often getting ahead of herself. But writing, she believes, is like a magical spell or talisman that can save both herself, and you, the reader from the horrors of humanity.
She describes her way of unfolding the story like an elaborate ‘fairy ball’ of mirror fragments reflecting each other in pieces of reality all jumbled together. ‘It’s not necessary for an event to be inside a square frame,’ she explains, which feels an honest assessment in a world crumbling into chaos, and the novel progresses as ‘stories inside stories. Stories interweaving with stories.’ Admittedly, this can be frustrating at times and feel like going nowhere fast as the plot seems to slowly drip forward. Though this is fitting for a story told tied to a bar in a bombed out basement for days on end with no end in sight to the threatening thunder of bombs in the distance. The narration style also builds terrific tension to the point where, at times, you feel it may shred you from the inside out.
Rima also does not have a good grasp on the events occurring, told much like a child experiencing big events but more focused on the fantasies in her head and it takes some parsing out to understand what is going on. She doesn’t know the politics unfolding in Syria but is aware her brother has opinions that cause their mother to silence him and cry fearfully. Armed checkpoints seem commonplace and watching vicious arrests doesn’t strike her as odd. Mostly she just noticed how everyone’s ‘eyes had become strange.’ This style isn’t unlike how in university we studied Faulkner’s Barn Burning as an example of an unreliable narrator that simply doesn’t know how to processes the events before them, yet here it is almost a mercy as we remain safely in Rima’s secret planet of thought with the violence and fear mostly glimpsed in the peripheries.
That said, Rima is very underestimated. While she may seem unable to exist in society, she also has a very clear sense of self. This helps her to remain calm and collected under the traumatic conditions around her, and during the siege she becomes a beacon of hope with her drawings and demeanor. She remains positive even when things are at their bleakest, though often this is partially through not understanding what is happening. ‘How can people feel miserable when they possess such a gigantic quantity of meanings?’ she wonders, and for her the world is full of meaning, mystery and magic. Colors are especially important in her world—possibly hinting at synesthesia though her influence on ascribing meaning to color comes from Al-Tha’alibi’s writings on color—and through her eyes even the darkest of days have a whimsical quality to them. People, such as her brother’s friend in the resistance, Hassan, are written with mythical heroic attributes and demeanor. Moments of pure terror and violence are viewed a bit detached however, such as watching political prisoners beaten to death by guards while in the hospital. It takes a bit to get in the groove of this book, but it is worth it and functions both poetically and cerebrally as it asks you to process and survive along with her.
‘This planet won’t disappear until I disappear.’
It is a book where it seems that nothing much is happening and everything is happening simultaneously due to the elusive plot threads. Early in the book her mother is shot in a checkpoint tussle and she is taken in by her brother as the siege unfolds. She thinks about death but only thinks of others as ‘disappearing’, having no context of the bloodshed occurring all around. She focuses on her art and writing, going from one safehouse to being left in a cellar, her final secret planet, the planet of clay. Her story captures the key elements of the Seige of Eastern Ghouta. For context, A 2018 report from the Syrian Network for Human Rights said approximately 13,000 civilians were killed in the siege, including 1,463 children and 1,127 women. During the siege 80% of the approximately 9,700 children in Ghouta suffered from severe malnutrition and 70% of the population lived underground due to the mass bombings. Despite being banned, goverment forces used aerial chlorine gas attacks, shown as the ‘smelly bubbles’ in some of the most horrific scenes in the novel and the aftermath being just as terrible.
Planet of Clay is a chilling novel that looks hard at the brutality that can occur within humanity. It is also a reminder that the dangers increase exponentially for the most vulnerable, demonstrated in many ways but most pronounced as Rima’s survival depends on someone else always getting her to safety and providing for her. She is easily forgotten and if something happens to her caregivers she may be stranded forever. While this is a story to evoke compassion it is also one that weighs very heavily in your heart and mind. But we must not look away, as Yazbek is giving voice to the people who need to be heard most. Refugee crises and war play out on the nightly news in the comfort and safety of “away from there”, and Yazbek needs us to know they are just like us and how quickly we could become just like them. ‘Here people are dying,’ Rima writes, ‘and there they hear the sounds that people die from.’ This is a moving novel worth the work and one that will cling to me long after I have finished it.
4/5
‘Actually the world wasn’t at all colorful like Wonderland was. The cats vanished and didn’t reappear.’
In April 2013, Syrian Government forces laid siege to eastern Ghouta, which lasted 5 years and continued even after a UN ceasefire resolution in early February 2018. Exiled Syrian journalist Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, brilliantly translated by [a:Leri Price|6727952|Leri Price|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] (for which it was shortlisted for the National Book Award in Translation), is brutal and poetic tale of the horrors of the Syrian Civil War told through the eyes of Rima, a young girl who spends much of the novel hiding from the bombings. Rima, who has chosen to never speak, has been deemed to suffering from mental illness yet through her writings we see that perhaps it is her mind that is the most rational tool in an irrational world. ‘I’m writing to you from my cellar, my secret new planet,’ she tells us, and through her love of literature she reconstructs what she understands of the death and dread around her into fantasy with frequent allusions to her favorite stories, [b:The Little Prince|157993|The Little Prince|Antoine de Saint-Exupéry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1367545443l/157993._SY75_.jpg|2180358] and [b:Alice's Adventures In Wonderland|24611820|Alice's Adventures in Wonderland|Anna Bond|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1426117422l/24611820._SX50_.jpg|55548884]. Yazbek looks horror directly in the eye through astonishingly poetic language and imagery, highlighting the brutality of war and the ways the most vulnerable suffer most in this passionately delivered story of survival and beauty in a world blown to pieces.
‘How could you escape dying if not by standing in front of it? Or at least looking straight at it?’
Samar Yazbek was forced into exile in Paris with her daughter in 2011 after being detained multiple times by Syria’s secret police under the Bashar al-Assad regime. However, she began clandestine returns into Syria to write about the descent into revolution and the early days of the uprisings, which she published in her 2012 book [b:The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria|25838272|The Crossing My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria|Samar Yazbek|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1441556772l/25838272._SY75_.jpg|43272226], for which she was awarded a PEN/Pinter Prize for an “International writer of courage”. In an interview with DAWN, she says ‘I felt it was my duty as an intellectual and as a writer to write the truth of what had happened in Syria. The victims needed to have this voice.’ She also founded Women Now for Development, an NGO for empowering women in Syria. ‘Writing nonfiction actually was more like an exile from my true self,’ she says, ‘ I was exiled both from my land and from my true self—from my identity as a novelist.’ With Planet of Clay she says ‘when I started writing this novel, it was like getting back to my true land.’ And what a land of literature it is, with both terror and compassion pouring out of every page.
‘Don’t think that what you are reading is a novel,’ Rima writes at the start of the novel, ‘what I am writing is the truth and I am doing it to understand what happened.’ Non-verbal Rima sees the world much differently than others, and because her habit of uncontrollably walking away she has spent her whole life either tied to her mother’s wrist or tied in the school library in which her mother works, being cared for by Sitt Soud, a loving librarian. In fact, Rima sees the library as one of her ‘special planets’, a safe space inspired by the planets in [b:The Little Prince|157993|The Little Prince|Antoine de Saint-Exupéry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1367545443l/157993._SY75_.jpg|2180358], which really sold me on loving this novel. She has a love for words but says ‘it is difficult to form relationships between words and reality’. She prefers images, often drawing but has a gift for beautiful writing and believes ‘every adjective in language is a painting.’ Her mind is always racing, and often in many directions, which makes the narrative quite circuitous, crisscrossing the timeline and often getting ahead of herself. But writing, she believes, is like a magical spell or talisman that can save both herself, and you, the reader from the horrors of humanity.
’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.’
She describes her way of unfolding the story like an elaborate ‘fairy ball’ of mirror fragments reflecting each other in pieces of reality all jumbled together. ‘It’s not necessary for an event to be inside a square frame,’ she explains, which feels an honest assessment in a world crumbling into chaos, and the novel progresses as ‘stories inside stories. Stories interweaving with stories.’ Admittedly, this can be frustrating at times and feel like going nowhere fast as the plot seems to slowly drip forward. Though this is fitting for a story told tied to a bar in a bombed out basement for days on end with no end in sight to the threatening thunder of bombs in the distance. The narration style also builds terrific tension to the point where, at times, you feel it may shred you from the inside out.
Rima also does not have a good grasp on the events occurring, told much like a child experiencing big events but more focused on the fantasies in her head and it takes some parsing out to understand what is going on. She doesn’t know the politics unfolding in Syria but is aware her brother has opinions that cause their mother to silence him and cry fearfully. Armed checkpoints seem commonplace and watching vicious arrests doesn’t strike her as odd. Mostly she just noticed how everyone’s ‘eyes had become strange.’ This style isn’t unlike how in university we studied Faulkner’s Barn Burning as an example of an unreliable narrator that simply doesn’t know how to processes the events before them, yet here it is almost a mercy as we remain safely in Rima’s secret planet of thought with the violence and fear mostly glimpsed in the peripheries.
That said, Rima is very underestimated. While she may seem unable to exist in society, she also has a very clear sense of self. This helps her to remain calm and collected under the traumatic conditions around her, and during the siege she becomes a beacon of hope with her drawings and demeanor. She remains positive even when things are at their bleakest, though often this is partially through not understanding what is happening. ‘How can people feel miserable when they possess such a gigantic quantity of meanings?’ she wonders, and for her the world is full of meaning, mystery and magic. Colors are especially important in her world—possibly hinting at synesthesia though her influence on ascribing meaning to color comes from Al-Tha’alibi’s writings on color—and through her eyes even the darkest of days have a whimsical quality to them. People, such as her brother’s friend in the resistance, Hassan, are written with mythical heroic attributes and demeanor. Moments of pure terror and violence are viewed a bit detached however, such as watching political prisoners beaten to death by guards while in the hospital. It takes a bit to get in the groove of this book, but it is worth it and functions both poetically and cerebrally as it asks you to process and survive along with her.
‘This planet won’t disappear until I disappear.’
It is a book where it seems that nothing much is happening and everything is happening simultaneously due to the elusive plot threads. Early in the book her mother is shot in a checkpoint tussle and she is taken in by her brother as the siege unfolds. She thinks about death but only thinks of others as ‘disappearing’, having no context of the bloodshed occurring all around. She focuses on her art and writing, going from one safehouse to being left in a cellar, her final secret planet, the planet of clay. Her story captures the key elements of the Seige of Eastern Ghouta. For context, A 2018 report from the Syrian Network for Human Rights said approximately 13,000 civilians were killed in the siege, including 1,463 children and 1,127 women. During the siege 80% of the approximately 9,700 children in Ghouta suffered from severe malnutrition and 70% of the population lived underground due to the mass bombings. Despite being banned, goverment forces used aerial chlorine gas attacks, shown as the ‘smelly bubbles’ in some of the most horrific scenes in the novel and the aftermath being just as terrible.
‘The planes dropped bombs on us that had poison gas inside, and these gases can penetrate clothing, and if someone is affected you have to take off their clothes so they won’t die. The women who had been treated had stayed in their clothes because the men said it was sinful for women to be uncovered in front of men, and Hassan was furious.’
Planet of Clay is a chilling novel that looks hard at the brutality that can occur within humanity. It is also a reminder that the dangers increase exponentially for the most vulnerable, demonstrated in many ways but most pronounced as Rima’s survival depends on someone else always getting her to safety and providing for her. She is easily forgotten and if something happens to her caregivers she may be stranded forever. While this is a story to evoke compassion it is also one that weighs very heavily in your heart and mind. But we must not look away, as Yazbek is giving voice to the people who need to be heard most. Refugee crises and war play out on the nightly news in the comfort and safety of “away from there”, and Yazbek needs us to know they are just like us and how quickly we could become just like them. ‘Here people are dying,’ Rima writes, ‘and there they hear the sounds that people die from.’ This is a moving novel worth the work and one that will cling to me long after I have finished it.
4/5
‘Actually the world wasn’t at all colorful like Wonderland was. The cats vanished and didn’t reappear.’
dark
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I liked the style of the story but at times the language was confusing and I didn’t know what the main character was talking about.
"Don't think that what you are reading is a novel. What I'm writing is the truth, and I am doing it to try and understand what happened."
Rima is a young girl from Damascus who sees life in colours and sings the Qu'ran. She listens more than she speaks and she is restrained from running as she seeks to make sense of the unimaginable horrors around her during the ongoing Syrian Civil War. In Planet of Clay, Samar Yazbek writes an uncanny exploration of acute conditions for the developing mind and spirit of Rima.
"Things don't exist before you feel them."
The book opens with the longest chapter and a sign of things to come as Rima and her mother are passing through checkpoints on their way to visit a friend. With surreal and poetic writing that engages with tension hanging from every paragraph, Rima's story is not unlike many other children's experiences in these horrific settings. Rima shows a strength that is hopeful or delusional, I am not sure. As the story continues, we can see her hope begin to fray at the edges of her sanity as she descends into further desperation for her survival surrounded by loss and destruction.
"I would like not to forget these moments I am writing down, because I can't draw them and they will be lost in my mind, just as I have lost many details from my old life."
I am still at a loss for words at the force and vulnerability of this book. From Rima's introspections on the colour of the purple sky, the eyes of others and the meanings of circles in stories, Planet Clay is a beyond powerful piece of translated literature from from a child's perspective in a part of the world we don't often read about. Full of incantations and imagination, Samar Yazbek has written about a world that melds the magical with the tragic to create a truly harrowing and emotional tale that hits the heart in all the human places.
"It would be beautiful if every death had its own colour. Death is a hat that makes colours invisible."
Rima is a young girl from Damascus who sees life in colours and sings the Qu'ran. She listens more than she speaks and she is restrained from running as she seeks to make sense of the unimaginable horrors around her during the ongoing Syrian Civil War. In Planet of Clay, Samar Yazbek writes an uncanny exploration of acute conditions for the developing mind and spirit of Rima.
"Things don't exist before you feel them."
The book opens with the longest chapter and a sign of things to come as Rima and her mother are passing through checkpoints on their way to visit a friend. With surreal and poetic writing that engages with tension hanging from every paragraph, Rima's story is not unlike many other children's experiences in these horrific settings. Rima shows a strength that is hopeful or delusional, I am not sure. As the story continues, we can see her hope begin to fray at the edges of her sanity as she descends into further desperation for her survival surrounded by loss and destruction.
"I would like not to forget these moments I am writing down, because I can't draw them and they will be lost in my mind, just as I have lost many details from my old life."
I am still at a loss for words at the force and vulnerability of this book. From Rima's introspections on the colour of the purple sky, the eyes of others and the meanings of circles in stories, Planet Clay is a beyond powerful piece of translated literature from from a child's perspective in a part of the world we don't often read about. Full of incantations and imagination, Samar Yazbek has written about a world that melds the magical with the tragic to create a truly harrowing and emotional tale that hits the heart in all the human places.
"It would be beautiful if every death had its own colour. Death is a hat that makes colours invisible."
emotional
reflective
sad
A difficult read, both for the subject matter and the narrative style. Planet of Clay follows Rima, a young woman living in Damascus with her mother and brother as the civil war is breaking out in the 2010s. Rima doesn't see the world the way her family or community does. As she says, her brain is in her feet, and she's compelled to walk and to see the world in circular stories. She chooses not to speak but sings the Qur'an and teaches children how to do art. As the war intensifies and tragedies mount, the gradually unspooling story Rima tells gives the reader a lovely, poetic point of view from which to see all the ugliness. The incongruity between how she sees the world and how the rest of the world treats her is heartbreaking. Glad I read it; glad it's over.
Upsetting, dark, visceral, original. Written from the perspective of a young woman who longs for freedom, while living with many restrictions that are physical, cultural, societal, metaphorical....
dark
emotional
sad
slow-paced
This was book number 6 for my #WomenInTranslation month reads, and it started out incredibly strong but unfortunately lost some steam around the last third. I struggled to finish it and I’m not sure exactly what happened there, which makes me think it could have just been my mood and I wasn’t concentrating properly. Because genuinely the first half was great!
.
Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, Planet of Clay is told from the perspective of Rima, a young Syrian girl who cannot stop walking, so she’s constantly either tied to her mother or restrained elsewhere. She doesn’t talk much, except for being able to recite the Qur’an, but she has a rich inner life filled with drawings & stories. Her world is shattered one day when soldiers open fire on the bus she’s on, killing her mother. She spends the rest of the book being shunted from safe place to safe place (some less safe than others), put into the care of various people who don’t really understand her.
.
I’ve read quite a few books set during wars told through the eyes of a child and they never get less harrowing. Rima’s innocence, her adoration of The Little Prince, her rambling, lighthearted tangents, all put the tragedy of the Syrian civil war into even sharper relief. She doesn’t understand everything happening around her, her childish narration of bombings, death, violence are extremely unsettling. Her observations and tales are constantly shooting off into various tangents, she promises us (we’re addressed directly) she’ll return to a certain story later but never does. At risk of sounding like I’m back in GCSE English, the confusion of Rima’s narrative reflects the chaos and tumult of a country in the midst of a civil war.
.
Maybe one day I’ll reread this and see if the story really does stumble in the last part, or if it was my issue! One I’d recommend if you have an interest in wartime fiction and child narrators!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Confinement, Violence, Death of parent, War, Injury/Injury detail
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated