Reviews with content warning for Torture - Salt Houses

This book follows 4 generations of a family. You have your favorite family members, the ones you're rooting for. There were family members I wanted to know more about. This book filled me with an uneasy sense of steadiness. Uprooting their family not once but 4-5 times! And they kept their steadiness. I can't imagine that. The strength, the pain. For anyone who wants a not, USA propaganda book about the Muslim experience, read this book and have your eyes and hearts opened.

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littleredmacks's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

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

3.0

3 stars

Palestinian American Poet

Historical Fiction

Follows 3 generations

Lack of plot

Lyrically written

The author, Hala Alyan, award-winning Palestinian American poet, novelist and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in numerous journals including The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner and Colorado Review. She resides in Brooklyn with her husband.

This book follows 3 generations of a family that was displaced and explores the effects that displacement and war can have on even the privileged. In many ways, then, this is a novel about privilege. Alyan takes groups we often see as disadvantaged, demonstrates their advantages, but shows us that privilege is still relative, and that trauma can still be experienced within such constructs.

They skip between one character to the next which can be jarring as they also skip froward a bit in the timeline.

There is a theme of ‘what do you do when you can never return home’ which I feel is a great theme to explore however this is a book lacking a true plot. So if that’s important to you I would consider other books. That being said, even with a lack of plat, this book was still lyrically written. It was well done.

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thenextbookdilemma's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad tense 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? Yes

5.0

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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

Content Warnings

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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katharina90's review

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.5

A raw, moving, well-written multigenerational novel with complex characters and realistic family dynamics.

The story pulled me in from the first page, but towards the end I felt less connected to the characters.

I found myself wanting to return to the POV of previous family members rather than focusing on the younger generation.

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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.

Content Warnings

lcg527's review against another edition

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emotional sad tense slow-paced

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

3.5

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