Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.65 AVERAGE
3.65 AVERAGE
I really enjoyed this book. I thought the author did a wonderful job of giving a voice to both characters and blurred the lines between who was good and bad. You'd think the book would be boring because it's about a house and who really owns it but it's suspenseful and you get sucked into the lives of these two characters and want to continue to know what's going to happen next.
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Synopsis:
"A former colonel in the Iranian Air Force yearns to restore his family's dignity. A recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck struggles to hold on to the one thing she has left. And her lover, a married cop, is driven to extremes to win her love.
Review:
"House of Sand and Fog" was a pretty decent story that involved two different people from two different nationalities and the differences of each of their struggles- one, the struggle with himself, the Colonel, of keeping his pride as he was, once, someone to be looked at of importance. The book tells the story of him and his Family making it in America, as an ordinary person, instead of the colonel that brought him great pride in his own country. You see his struggles, his temperament, as his Wife does not understand him, or how to live without being a Woman that is looked up to for her lavish living.
The story also follows a Woman who struggles with her own demons and refuses to look past a county tax office's mistake of auctioning her home and the significance that the home brings her. She meets a deputy who will go to great lengths to prove his love to her, including leaving his own family.
The story comes to a head when neither homeowner can come to an agreement and instead of, rightfully, blaming the tax office, they blame each other and ruin their families in the process.
A heartbreaking story of what it costs to hold onto your pride and place the blame on everyone else around you, without looking at your own mistakes.
"A former colonel in the Iranian Air Force yearns to restore his family's dignity. A recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck struggles to hold on to the one thing she has left. And her lover, a married cop, is driven to extremes to win her love.
Review:
"House of Sand and Fog" was a pretty decent story that involved two different people from two different nationalities and the differences of each of their struggles- one, the struggle with himself, the Colonel, of keeping his pride as he was, once, someone to be looked at of importance. The book tells the story of him and his Family making it in America, as an ordinary person, instead of the colonel that brought him great pride in his own country. You see his struggles, his temperament, as his Wife does not understand him, or how to live without being a Woman that is looked up to for her lavish living.
The story also follows a Woman who struggles with her own demons and refuses to look past a county tax office's mistake of auctioning her home and the significance that the home brings her. She meets a deputy who will go to great lengths to prove his love to her, including leaving his own family.
The story comes to a head when neither homeowner can come to an agreement and instead of, rightfully, blaming the tax office, they blame each other and ruin their families in the process.
A heartbreaking story of what it costs to hold onto your pride and place the blame on everyone else around you, without looking at your own mistakes.
For a story centered around a property ownership dispute, The House of Sand and Fog is surprisingly compelling. As things escalate on both sides, the tension builds and you feel a sense of impending doom. The characters are realistic and sympathetic, despite their flaws. The story has great momentum until about the fourth quarter, where the plot ventures into the utterly absurd. The sequence of events that lead to the climax are so preposterous that I found myself struggling to finish. The ending is so tragic, it’s Shakespearean. It’s remarkable how things go so terribly wrong for everyone involved. And while the pacing starts out great, certain parts go on too long (we spend way too much time at the fish camp) and the last chapter was honestly not necessary at all.
This book could have been tighter towards the end; it gets a little bit predictable, and meanders to a close rather than ends. That aside, this is still an incredibly powerful piece of work. It's not a light book to get through; there are no heroes and there are very few innocents. Behrani, Kathy and Lester, three of the main characters of the novel, are all some of the most finely carved characters I've read in a long time. None of them are perfect; they are all fallible, none of them are even particularly likeable, to my mind. They are all however incredibly human, with a depth and complexity to their actions and reactions that feel utterly real.
The most important character of all isn't human at all, though. It's the eponymous house that Kathy loses and Behrani pins all his hopes on. It really is exactly like the title says, a house composed of ephemeral, shifting things, the things Kathy wants to hold on to and the things Behrani wants to achieve. There's a real sense of the house shifting what it is, of being all things and all times to all people, as the book progresses.
The prose is beautifully clear; not especially lyrical, but nicely fluid. Dubus also gets my approval for writing English from Behrani's perspective convincingly as the voice of someone who speaks English as their second language; he doesn't fall into cliches, but writes L1 interference convincingly, something which is all too rare. I'm definitely going to watch the movie adaptation if I get a chance, because I have the feeling that Jennifer Connolly and Ben Kingsley could make something truly wonderful out of source material as good as this.
The most important character of all isn't human at all, though. It's the eponymous house that Kathy loses and Behrani pins all his hopes on. It really is exactly like the title says, a house composed of ephemeral, shifting things, the things Kathy wants to hold on to and the things Behrani wants to achieve. There's a real sense of the house shifting what it is, of being all things and all times to all people, as the book progresses.
The prose is beautifully clear; not especially lyrical, but nicely fluid. Dubus also gets my approval for writing English from Behrani's perspective convincingly as the voice of someone who speaks English as their second language; he doesn't fall into cliches, but writes L1 interference convincingly, something which is all too rare. I'm definitely going to watch the movie adaptation if I get a chance, because I have the feeling that Jennifer Connolly and Ben Kingsley could make something truly wonderful out of source material as good as this.
I liked it very much, though I had some difficulty getting into the story in the beginning. Still, I kept reading and didn't regret it. We're introduced to a family that buys a house belonging to Kathy Nicolo, which is taken from her through a tax mistake and from then on things become increasingly complicated, leading into the second part of the story, which sets a different tone to it, sending us down a path of destruction and fear and fatal mistakes. Its tragic ending touched me deeply.
Until I read this book, I didn't know a man could write so well from the female's perspective. The movie version of this story is also the best book-to-film adaptation I have ever witnessed. They change the end a lot though, which was a little disappointing.
This book was so intense. A very dramatic story about one house being fought over by people drowning in their own dark life situations. I did not like Kathy. There were times I sympathized with her, but at the end of Part II, I was just done with her. I connected more with the Colonel even though he, too, was hard to like. Just a heavy, heavy book; one I'm glad I read, but won't pick up again.
A good read but I found the main character incredibly annoying. She loses her house because of her habit of ignoring her mail then flips out when another buys it fair and square. It was difficult to empathize with her. What an idiot.
challenging
dark
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide, Violence