Reviews with content warning for Abandonment - These Impossible Things

Reviews tagging 'Abandonment'

These Impossible Things by Salma El-Wardany

6 reviews

anniesher23's review

emotional funny medium-paced

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

2.0

I really wanted to like this one. I love the idea of a book about 20-something female friendships, which is how this was marketed. The overall message was definitely how important female friendships are, but you don’t actually see the characters’ friendships for the vast majority of the book.

All of this could be okay, but the writing was just really not good. The dialogue felt like watching a bad teen Netflix drama and the prose could get cringey as well.

There were parts of the story/certain relationships that I really loved, but I wanted more from the author even in those parts.

Finally, I didn’t love how men were depicted generally. It’s not my place to criticize how an Arab woman depicts Arab men. It made me a bit uncomfortable that all the Arab men were various levels of shitty people, but I recognize it’s the author’s choice to depict misogyny in her own culture and that’s completely fair. But then why were the white men SO GREAT? Go ahead and write a story where one of the themes is misogyny in your own culture, but why pretend it doesn’t exist in others? It felt very unbalanced and unrealistic.

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znvisser's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

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

3.75

My expectations for this were high based on the ratings and that is always a tricky challenge to make true. For me, this novel consisted of two parts and the second half was definitely better.

The book starts out quite dialogue-heavy and at times it even felt like five year old twitter discourse in a novel. And - despite the obvious reasons for it which were in fact interesting and well-thought out - I felt Malak and Kees were too similar for too long (kept forgetting which details and man belonged to which woman) and their boyfriends were even harder to distinguish; in contrast, Jenna’s character stood out way more from the start, despite her more limited “screentime”. But while Malak and Kees’ stories do bounce off each other and dance together, Jenna is fairly seperated from them and mostly appearing as vehicle for some extra themes and subplots. Later on she is worked better into the overall story, but it still felt slightly disjointed and I feel she could’ve added more to this if the author were less busy drawing parallels.

Nevertheless, emotionally it picks up in the second half and that is where this story shines all along: the fights are often unhinged and always heartbreaking, and although mostly shown in glimpses, I loved the sibling relationships, and also the little pieces within chapters where we zoom out from the three friends and an omniscient narrator reveals a new emotional layer. Because of these strengths, this really was a a promising debut, making me curious to see what El-Wardany will come up with next.

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