A review by ceallaighsbooks
Salt Houses by Hala Alyan

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
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