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A review by thisreadingcorner
The Arsonists' City by Hala Alyan
4.0
The Nasr family have long spread out when Idris (Lebanese dad) decides that it is time to sell the family home and ropes Mazna (Syrian mom) into corralling their children back to Beirut for a final farewell to both their grandfather and the Nasr home.
The kids:
-Ava is an academic in real need of a vacation from her life in New York and her marriage, just not in the way she expected.
-Mimi, overgrown Pete Wentz wannabe in Austin, is grappling with his musical dreams collapsing down to a mostly local band. On the personal front, he at least has suckered a woman willing to endure the endless scrutiny of his family and his many shenanigans.
-Naj, the family celebrity, is living out her wild life as a musician in Beirut and not exactly thrilled to see the family converge on her home base.
Their parents Idris and Mazna are forty years into a mutually destructive marriage of inconvenience laden in secrets, guilt, and manipulation. Mess of the highest order and for sure the most compelling part of the narrative aside from Naj as a person.
I flew through this in part by necessity (I absolutely did read it all the day of my book my book club meeting) but also out of curiosity - after a lengthy and slow intro to the various places and people behind the Nasr family, Halan gets into the meat of the story and I was ensnared.
Recommended for fans of a multigenerational mess, anyone looking for a fictional but very much realistic book by a Palestinian author, and readers with the patience to get through longer than ideal context setting. I would read more by the author for sure and I’ll pretend there’s an alternate universe version where Zakaria gets everything he deserved.
The kids:
-Ava is an academic in real need of a vacation from her life in New York and her marriage, just not in the way she expected.
-Mimi, overgrown Pete Wentz wannabe in Austin, is grappling with his musical dreams collapsing down to a mostly local band. On the personal front, he at least has suckered a woman willing to endure the endless scrutiny of his family and his many shenanigans.
-Naj, the family celebrity, is living out her wild life as a musician in Beirut and not exactly thrilled to see the family converge on her home base.
Their parents Idris and Mazna are forty years into a mutually destructive marriage of inconvenience laden in secrets, guilt, and manipulation. Mess of the highest order and for sure the most compelling part of the narrative aside from Naj as a person.
I flew through this in part by necessity (I absolutely did read it all the day of my book my book club meeting) but also out of curiosity - after a lengthy and slow intro to the various places and people behind the Nasr family, Halan gets into the meat of the story and I was ensnared.
Recommended for fans of a multigenerational mess, anyone looking for a fictional but very much realistic book by a Palestinian author, and readers with the patience to get through longer than ideal context setting. I would read more by the author for sure and I’ll pretend there’s an alternate universe version where Zakaria gets everything he deserved.