You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
melodier93 's review for:
Ayesha at Last
by Uzma Jalaluddin
2.5 stars
This was just so disappointing. The premise - Pride and Prejudice with Canadian Muslims - is brilliant, and I was really excited to see how the novel would translate plots and ideas from P&P into this different cultural context. But this...was just so mediocre.
First, the good:
-FOOD DESCRIPTIONS. Reading this made me hungry enough that I made curry last night.
-The occasional moments of congruence with lines from P&P were very cute, especially in the way they translated to expectations with Muslim women
-Ayesha’s grandparents are pretty delightful, if over-the-top in articulating the theme
The bad:
-Flat, cartoonish characters whose motivations and behavior change on a dime. Three ridiculously over the top villains with zero subtlety. People whose actions don’t resemble any human being ever. And a fairly bland set of main characters who I just didn’t feel the chemistry between.
-The writing is unfortunately obvious and clunky. There wasn’t a single sentence in this book that I felt like underlining either for its profundity or its humor.
-One of my biggest pet peeves in fiction is when a character is a poet or a writer or a musician and then we get to see their work and it is NOT GREAT. Ayesha’s poetry is bad. It’s really, really bad. And when everyone was whooping and cheering for her to become a professional poet I wanted to beg her not to quit her day job, because it is not good. Also there’s a scene where she randomly recites a completely out of context soliloquy from Macbeth for absolutely no reason and then it’s never spoken of again?
I could go on. I know a lot of people have enjoyed this book, and I really, really wanted to as well. But it just didn’t work for me at all.
This was just so disappointing. The premise - Pride and Prejudice with Canadian Muslims - is brilliant, and I was really excited to see how the novel would translate plots and ideas from P&P into this different cultural context. But this...was just so mediocre.
First, the good:
-FOOD DESCRIPTIONS. Reading this made me hungry enough that I made curry last night.
-The occasional moments of congruence with lines from P&P were very cute, especially in the way they translated to expectations with Muslim women
-Ayesha’s grandparents are pretty delightful, if over-the-top in articulating the theme
The bad:
-Flat, cartoonish characters whose motivations and behavior change on a dime. Three ridiculously over the top villains with zero subtlety. People whose actions don’t resemble any human being ever. And a fairly bland set of main characters who I just didn’t feel the chemistry between.
-The writing is unfortunately obvious and clunky. There wasn’t a single sentence in this book that I felt like underlining either for its profundity or its humor.
-One of my biggest pet peeves in fiction is when a character is a poet or a writer or a musician and then we get to see their work and it is NOT GREAT. Ayesha’s poetry is bad. It’s really, really bad. And when everyone was whooping and cheering for her to become a professional poet I wanted to beg her not to quit her day job, because it is not good. Also there’s a scene where she randomly recites a completely out of context soliloquy from Macbeth for absolutely no reason and then it’s never spoken of again?
I could go on. I know a lot of people have enjoyed this book, and I really, really wanted to as well. But it just didn’t work for me at all.