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abbie_'s review against another edition
dark
emotional
sad
slow-paced
3.5
This was book number 6 for my #WomenInTranslation month reads, and it started out incredibly strong but unfortunately lost some steam around the last third. I struggled to finish it and I’m not sure exactly what happened there, which makes me think it could have just been my mood and I wasn’t concentrating properly. Because genuinely the first half was great!
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Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, Planet of Clay is told from the perspective of Rima, a young Syrian girl who cannot stop walking, so she’s constantly either tied to her mother or restrained elsewhere. She doesn’t talk much, except for being able to recite the Qur’an, but she has a rich inner life filled with drawings & stories. Her world is shattered one day when soldiers open fire on the bus she’s on, killing her mother. She spends the rest of the book being shunted from safe place to safe place (some less safe than others), put into the care of various people who don’t really understand her.
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I’ve read quite a few books set during wars told through the eyes of a child and they never get less harrowing. Rima’s innocence, her adoration of The Little Prince, her rambling, lighthearted tangents, all put the tragedy of the Syrian civil war into even sharper relief. She doesn’t understand everything happening around her, her childish narration of bombings, death, violence are extremely unsettling. Her observations and tales are constantly shooting off into various tangents, she promises us (we’re addressed directly) she’ll return to a certain story later but never does. At risk of sounding like I’m back in GCSE English, the confusion of Rima’s narrative reflects the chaos and tumult of a country in the midst of a civil war.
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Maybe one day I’ll reread this and see if the story really does stumble in the last part, or if it was my issue! One I’d recommend if you have an interest in wartime fiction and child narrators!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Injury/Injury detail, Death of parent, Violence, War, and Confinement
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