Reviews - The Guardian of Surfaces

585 reviews for:

The Guardian of Surfaces

Bothayna Al-Essa

4.05 AVERAGE

woodsyowl's review against another edition

5.0

challenging dark emotional reflective fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

daniellereads12's review against another edition

4.0

adventurous challenging emotional mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

lorayne's review against another edition

5.0

dark funny inspiring mysterious sad fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

This book is so good! I love it as a companion read to 1984 by George Orwell and to V for Vendetta (while I haven't read the graphic novel, I'm a big fan of the movie).

Bothayna Al-Essa's writing is so beautiful--or as far as I can tell from the translation. I wish I could read it in the original language because I can only imagine how much more beautiful it is. The allusions to so many other books and stories warmed my heart while also making me feel sad for the dystopian world of the book censor and his familly. I also appreciated the distance Al-Essa created between the reader and the characters. It felt necessary in order to understand the shallowness of the day-to-day lives the characters had to live and were "happy" to live per their conditioning. It reminds me of the constant conditioning and propaganda we all suffer.

This was a fast read, and the ending did not disappoint.

dummypages's review against another edition

4.0

challenging funny reflective fast-paced

rebcamuse's review against another edition

4.0

dark funny mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

While not totally subtle in its satire, Al-Essa's novel succeeds with a dark whimsy befitting Alice and Wonderland, which serves as larger reference for the story in more ways than one. But Al-Essa's looking glass is perhaps more than it seems, and we are easily manipulated into caring for characters even though they bear titles, like stock figures, rather than names. The "Everyman" approach keeps a strange distance, until we come to understand the power of our own imaginations with an ending that has been described as a "narrative rupture" or a "twist worthy of Kafka." The ending made me a bit cranky, initially, but the more I thought about it, it seemed perfect to serve Al-Essa's true narrative, with its hanging threads and all.