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banana_brend 's review for:
Behind You Is the Sea
by Susan Muaddi Darraj
I picked this one up because I was eager to read a novel that explores and celebrates Palestinian culture without focusing on or reducing that rich and complex culture to the grief Palestinians continue to face in their homeland because of Israel.
This book is billed as a novel that follows the lives of several interconnected Palestinian American families living in Baltimore. While this is a fair depiction of the book, it also reads as a collection of several related short stories. In this format, some stories unavoidably stand out more than others. Where those "better" portions of this book stood out for me, they worked really well. The last 30 pages or so were particularly compelling. I also found the metaphor in the book's eponymous story effective: Darraj seems to be suggesting that just as the sea is behind the soldiers in the speech the book title references, so too is the life - whether a good one or a hard one -that immigrants leave behind when they come to America. Darraj seems to contend that the task remaining after the move is to make the best of one's life here in this (broken) country, without forgetting about one's roots.
Despite these positive attributes, the book also left me feeling frustrated in some respects. Although I don't know the motivations behind Darraj's decision to write this book (and can't fully know or understand her own experiences as a Palestinian American), this book almost appeared to be written for a non-Arab audience. I suppose what I mean by that is it incorporated stereotypes and tropes that actually felt somewhat harmful to the Arab world and Palestinian people. The book also presented a lot of characters, which made it tricky at first to settle into.
This book is billed as a novel that follows the lives of several interconnected Palestinian American families living in Baltimore. While this is a fair depiction of the book, it also reads as a collection of several related short stories. In this format, some stories unavoidably stand out more than others. Where those "better" portions of this book stood out for me, they worked really well. The last 30 pages or so were particularly compelling. I also found the metaphor in the book's eponymous story effective: Darraj seems to be suggesting that just as the sea is behind the soldiers in the speech the book title references, so too is the life - whether a good one or a hard one -that immigrants leave behind when they come to America. Darraj seems to contend that the task remaining after the move is to make the best of one's life here in this (broken) country, without forgetting about one's roots.
Despite these positive attributes, the book also left me feeling frustrated in some respects. Although I don't know the motivations behind Darraj's decision to write this book (and can't fully know or understand her own experiences as a Palestinian American), this book almost appeared to be written for a non-Arab audience. I suppose what I mean by that is it incorporated stereotypes and tropes that actually felt somewhat harmful to the Arab world and Palestinian people. The book also presented a lot of characters, which made it tricky at first to settle into.