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A review by ajobeau
I Love I Hate I Miss My Sister by Amélie Sarn
3.0
This novel broke my heart. Amelie Sarn’s novel, I Love, I Hate, I Miss my Sister, tells the story of Sohane and Djelila—two sisters with a complicated relationship. The two girls obviously have a lot of love for one another, but their relationship is complicated by their diverging paths. As Sohane becomes increasingly more religious and even starts to wear a head covering to school in representation of her Muslim faith, Djelila becomes more and more secular through her choices of friends and activities. This causes the two to grow apart until Djelila is dead and Sohane is left without a sister and with a broken heart.
This book was sad for many reasons. One, that I fairly obvious, is the plot itself. Reading about someone’s sister who has died was quite disturbing. I couldn’t separate the story of the novel from my own life. I kept picturing my sister and myself in place of Sohane and Djelila. A second part that was quite sad to me was the treatment that Sohane received in response to her head covering. Sohane was asked multiple times to take it off, and when she refused her teachers asked her to leave their class and later the school. Toward the end of the novel, Sohane was asked to leave a women’s group meeting at the community center because of her scarf. The actions that people made toward her were very sad to me. They saw the head covering as a symbol of oppression. This showed their overall ignorance of the Islamic faith. However, Sohane made little effort to educate people and share her own views on why she was wearing the head covering. This also frustrated me.
Although I enjoyed this novel, I only gave it three out of five stars because of the writing. The narrator—Sohane—would jump back and forth between before her sister died and after. However, she gave little indication of what time she was referring to, and this made the story a little complicated to follow.
This book was sad for many reasons. One, that I fairly obvious, is the plot itself. Reading about someone’s sister who has died was quite disturbing. I couldn’t separate the story of the novel from my own life. I kept picturing my sister and myself in place of Sohane and Djelila. A second part that was quite sad to me was the treatment that Sohane received in response to her head covering. Sohane was asked multiple times to take it off, and when she refused her teachers asked her to leave their class and later the school. Toward the end of the novel, Sohane was asked to leave a women’s group meeting at the community center because of her scarf. The actions that people made toward her were very sad to me. They saw the head covering as a symbol of oppression. This showed their overall ignorance of the Islamic faith. However, Sohane made little effort to educate people and share her own views on why she was wearing the head covering. This also frustrated me.
Although I enjoyed this novel, I only gave it three out of five stars because of the writing. The narrator—Sohane—would jump back and forth between before her sister died and after. However, she gave little indication of what time she was referring to, and this made the story a little complicated to follow.