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A review by meghan111
Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea
3.0
So this is about a group of friends in Saudi Arabia, from their late teenage years through marriages and divorces, and it's structured and written in a way similar to the Gossip Girls books, where an anonymous narrator is sending out a weekly email about the doings of the group. And the girls in Iran are wealthy like the Gossip Girls, and mention a lot of the same luxury brands and are in some aspects very Westernized.
Things get interesting with this, though, and it makes for compelling reading, not because of the writing, but because the book reveals so much about what it's like to live with enormous constraints on your behavior, and what it's like to live in a society where the genders are completely unequal, and how personal choices are complicated by the limits of what is proper in Saudi society. And yet at the same time I found myself just reading this on a surface level as a chick-lit type book about four friends.
Things get interesting with this, though, and it makes for compelling reading, not because of the writing, but because the book reveals so much about what it's like to live with enormous constraints on your behavior, and what it's like to live in a society where the genders are completely unequal, and how personal choices are complicated by the limits of what is proper in Saudi society. And yet at the same time I found myself just reading this on a surface level as a chick-lit type book about four friends.