Reviews

This book destroyed me in the best way possible. It was full of hope and despair, tragedy, shame, and religious trauma. There was no happy ending for either character, which felt like the only way this story could have ended. The choppy style of writing made the book feel like a fever dream where you’re constantly bouncing from scene to scene and place to place. I know some people in other reviews didn’t like that but I felt like it was the only way to truly show what Ramy was experiencing, as it felt like he could only go through the motions and was never fully present in his life. How could he be, when he saw a close friend and his two lovers murdered for being gay at the very beginning? Overall, I loved this book. It was a short read but I know it will stay with me for years to come.

raccoonjess's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

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

5.0

male_lactation's review against another edition

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fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

I was captivated by the premise of this book but eventually found the consistently scant and selective descriptions and explorations of the characters and world to be too much to handle. For example, at the start of the book, the main character, Ramy, is prepared to leave Iraq with his boyfriend, but backs out while in the car with him. As if he knew this would happen, the boyfriend

shoots himself

in front of Ramy instead of continuing to live in a violently homophobic country. This is addressed during the following pages, but its relevance for the rest of the story and for Ramy almost completely disappears after that. It was hard to take any of the major events of the book seriously when things like this consistently happened. Worse, the book chose to keep the reader's connection to first-person narrators Ramy and Ammar that it was entirely discombobulating to have certain details withheld and for reading subtext to be necessary, which became increasingly common as the book neared its end. It wasn't that being asked to 'read between the lines' in itself was irritating, it was that the book was so blatantly veering off the course it had made for itself to that point that the writing felt tactless and manipulative. I wish I could say I learned something about Iraq, the effect of the US invasion on its people, and the queer community in Iraq through reading this, but barring two solitary mentions of the war happening at that moment, this book could have been set within any Muslim country and at any time. This book was shallow and inconsistent.

I have another concern with a specific scene which really took me out of the book entirely and completely rubbed me the wrong way. This contains spoilers.

Ammar is one of two narrators of the book, and is a Muslim sheikh who (re?)discovers his own homosexuality through his correspondence and interactions with Ramy. He begins to receive visions of holy figures, one of whom is the angel Gabriel, who coerces and convinces him to consider homosexuality in a real way. However, in one vision, Ammar is teleported into the body of a man who is the penetrative partner in anal sex between two men, and is forced to feel all the sensations of the body of this man while not having any control over the sex act. I don't see how Namir could not have understood this as some form of divinely-facilitated (if ostensibly well-intentioned) rape, and it is an unthinkable oversight for the book to contain this situation, especially as it stands to oppose people and regimes who might frame gay people and especially gay men as predatory and coercive.

haleydavis112's review against another edition

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dark sad tense medium-paced

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

4.0

bucketsofbooks's review against another edition

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2.0

Didn’t really work for me

juliacremin's review against another edition

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4.0

Read this in one sitting - really immersive and interesting, but I couldn’t sit well with the fact that the person he was in love with killed himself in front of him and he moved on so quickly.

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