Reviews with content warning for Rape - Salt Houses

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Salt Houses by Hala Alyan

22 reviews

rachelfayreads's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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ceallaighsbooks's review against another edition

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emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring lighthearted reflective sad fast-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

4.75

“Unusual, pretty things fill the store, mirrors and coral necklaces and leather-bound notebooks. But she must be onto something, because people want beautiful things even in hard times—perhaps especially in hard times—and the store keeps her afloat. Atef ends each trip feeling wistful, watching his daughter living the life she has foraged, like an island survivor in a palace of shells.”

TITLE—Salt Houses

AUTHOR—Hala Alyan

PUBLISHED—2017

PUBLISHER—Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

GENRE—literary, historical—> contemporary fiction

SETTING—PαlestᎥne, Kuwait, Amman, Beirut, Paris, america

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—family, PαlestᎥnᎥαn history & culture, displacement, inherited trauma, secrets, familial & cultural legacy, individual identity & agency, choices, Faith, intergenerational connection & support, settler colonialism, Home spaces

Summary:

"Salt Houses is a piercingly elegant novel that registers Pαlestꭵne with deep resonance for what it is: a once beloved home, known, lost, and reimagined into life. In the exquisite prose of a poet, Hala Alyan shows how we carry our origins in our hearts wherever we may roam, and how that history is calibrated by the places we choose to put down roots. This is a book with the power to both break and mend your heart." — Ru Freeman, author of ON SAL MAL LANE

My thoughts:

I feel like I don’t read a whole lot of non-speculative or non-fantasy literary fiction but boy when I do it really leaves an impression. I’m thinking specifically of Naomi Jackson’s THE STAR SIDE OF BIRD HILL which I read earlier this year and of which Alyan’s book reminded me a lot, as well as HOMEGOING by Yaa Gyasi.

All three of these books were special in the way they showed intergenerational legacy and connection, displacement and trauma. They were also similar in the sense that they each told their stories through multiple POVs across multiple generations of families. And while there are many books that do all of the above what is special about these three specifically is that every single perspective, every story, every experience was just so devastatingly resonant that I never found myself thinking that any chapter wasn’t as strong as the others at any point. In fact, I only kept getting more and more invested right to the very end.

“A wolf can be killed. Trapped, skinned. But Alia knows that certain men—she remembers them, with their flags and their teeth—have skin like steel, are reborn into other men in the morning, grow more terrible, more powerful, with each sun.”

What I love about contemporary literary fiction is its ability to paint such a powerful and intimate portrait of people, places, and experiences that would otherwise be out of reach to readers on opposite sides of the planet, the century, or maybe even just across barriers of ideology, worldview, and experience which can be the most divisive and alienating of all distances.

And what was particularly impactful and devastating about reading Alyan’s book was that every time I put it down I was confronted with the fact that everything that was happening in this novel was still happening today, indeed right at that very minute. PαlestᎥnᎥαns were losing loved ones, being martyred, having their homes and entire worlds stolen from them and destroyed once again. Literature like Alyan’s pulls the reader into a deeper intimacy with these strangers across oceans and continents until their pain becomes your pain and their fight your fight, reminding us that none of us are free until we all are free.

I would recommend this book to readers who love poetic prose and vivid literary family portraits. This book is best read reflectively and introspectively.

“For years she kept a poster taped above her desk of a young man mid-hurl, a stone flying in the air. Along the border were sentences calligraphed in Arabic. His arm arched like an arrow, his face hidden beneath a scarf. The stone had just left his fingertips. A part of her knew such posters were romanticism, envy at best. Still, she hoped he hit what he was aiming for.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.75

Season: Summer

CW // rape, torture, domestic violence, alzheimer’s (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—

HOMEGOING by Yaa Gyasi
THE STAR SIDE OF BIRD HILL by Naomi Jackson
THE VANISHING HALF by Brit Bennett
PACHINKO by Min Jin Lee—TBR
WILD THORNS by Sahar Khalifeh—TBR
MY FATHER WAS A FREEDOM FIGHTER by Ramzy Baroud—TBR

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lettuce_read's review against another edition

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5.0

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salemander's review against another edition

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5.0

such a beautiful and profound book spanning generations with perfectly flawed narrators. the heartbreak and trauma of this family and the countless Palestinian families who have faced genocide at the hands of Israel is so well illustrated throughout this book. from the river to the sea. always.

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yourbookishbff's review

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challenging emotional funny reflective sad medium-paced

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

5.0

Salt Houses, by Hala Alyan, traces four generations of Palestinians through exile - from Palestine to Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Paris and Boston. Where multi-generational sagas always feel epic, this story is also painfully intimate. It’s a story filled with ghosts - of Palestine, of family members murdered or imprisoned or lost to time and distance and bitterness, of all the things we are too scared to say out loud to the people we love. The lives and love of Alia and Atef anchor the story, and we see their childhoods and young love, their deep trauma during the Six-Day War and subsequent flight to Kuwait, their early marriage with young children, the ceaseless displacement, the restless moves from country to country as they try to build lives free of war and occupation. Spinning out from them, we see their children and grandchildren with inherited trauma and grief fighting for reclamation and joy. This is a diaspora story where “houses as old as the earth itself” are replaced by “structures made of salt.”

And woven throughout each generation are moments of raw tenderness that boldly refute the dehumanization and violent caricaturization of Arab men we’ve witnessed through the last several decades. Instead: Mustafa, cradling a baby bird for his sister. Mustafa, practicing a speech for hours to get it just right. Mustafa, released from prison, kneeling to kiss his mother’s feet as he whispers never again. Atef making wishes to the moon with Riham. Atef drinking tea in the garden every afternoon with his daughter. Karam calming his mother’s fears and his sister’s anger. Zain reeling in Linah’s wild temper and restlessness. Alyan whispering to us: see this, and this, and this. Every life, an entire universe.

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dragongirl271's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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ayeshanagaria's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad fast-paced

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

5.0

a stunning novel about real muslim people whose lives are all colored by the cruel backdrop of war in Palestine

it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a while, and really delves into the flaws of characters borne through generational trauma – highly, highly recommend to anyone looking to bring nuance and life to the headlines and statistics of the past few weeks

just incredible muslim literature <3

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jobaji's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad tense fast-paced

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

5.0

This book might be my favorite of the year. Everyone in this book felt so familiar and comforting to me, although I am Syrian, not Palestinian, and the family dynamics are so beautiful. The constant displacement of these characters and the paths that they follow that mirror those of their relatives are so fascinating to read. I just finished the book and I’m crying as I write this. Read this book. It’s just so beautiful.

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brilliantsilver's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes

4.5

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erinblue's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad 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

4.75

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