Reviews - Salt Houses | The StoryGraph

1.83k reviews for:

Salt Houses

Hala Alyan

4.2 AVERAGE

prollyreads's review against another edition

4.0

emotional inspiring medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

mhmcleod's review against another edition

4.25

An interesting story that centers strong female characters, following historical events through the lens of a single family’s multigenerational experiences

craftyk17's review against another edition

3.5

emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

drfuriosa's review against another edition

4.0

This is a family drama that is both global and relevant. It takes place in Palestine, Kuwait, Lebanon, Jordan, Paris, and Boston. It spans four generations from matriarch Salma, to her three children: Widad, Mustafa, and Alia. It opens the day before Alia's wedding and it unfolds over the next decades, from the Six Days War, to the Kuwait War, to anxieties after 9/11. It is beautifully written and engrossing for its attention to detail and depiction of characters. I would give this a solid 4.5, and I plan to include this in a future teaching rotation. I'm eager to see what Ms. Alyan writes next.

dileksayed89's review against another edition

5.0

I don’t even know where to begin. The layers… the details... In Turkish, there’s an expression I often use: kitap gibi kitap; roman gibi roman, which means “there are novels, and then there are novels.”

Hala Alyan has written one of those novels—profound and essential, if you're willing to truly see it. Salt Houses is a must-read for anyone who is an immigrant, displaced, or from a family with such experiences.

✨✨✨✨✨

This novel shatters the expectations of a white audience. It doesn't merely recount the pain of discrimination and displacement but delves deeper, exploring personal anguish from rarely discussed sources. It mourns—mourning lost places, people, and connections—and captures facets of conflict and life seldom addressed in Western fiction. Alyan illuminates the profound effects of disrupted roots and the absence of a stable home, themes often overlooked.

Through her narrative, Alyan also examines generational and inherited trauma, focusing on the middle class. Even without diving into the deeper meanings, Salt Houses works as a compelling family drama, demonstrating Alyan’s mastery of both the genre and the complexities of Palestinian displacement.

hubes's review against another edition

5.0

emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

nataliecoyne's review against another edition

3.5

challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I really wanted to rate this higher, I really did. I started out this review with it at 3.75, but as I continued writing, I just knew that it just didn't feel right and brought it down to 3.5. :/ Let me be clear that I enjoyed this more than I did The Arsonists' City (which I just gave a pure 3 stars) and I truly am glad that I read this. It has beautiful storytelling. But I encountered, again, one of the major problems I had encountered with The Arsonists' City. And that is just that, for some reason, it was difficult to keep my attention on this book.

I will say that I enjoyed a good amount of this book. From the one-third mark to the four-fifths mark (so about 33% to about 80%, or for my copy, from page 104 through page 249) I did feel quite invested. But getting to that 33% point, and then coming out of that 80% point, was hard. It was, in fact, disappointing to me that things fell off for me again after the 80% point, because if things hadn't, I probably would've given this at least 3.75 stars (or possibly even 4 stars).

I don't think that there's anything necessarily objectively wrong with this book (or with The Arsonists' City). Like I said, I found this to have some really beautiful storytelling. I think it might just be that Hala Alyan's writing isn't a fit with my reading preferences and I'll, unfortunately, probably just have to skip reading any future books by her. Oh well. I'm still glad that I read both of these books, though, and there are some others who I would recommend both books to.

Content Warnings