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A review by thecasuallibrarian
A Land of Permanent Goodbyes by Atia Abawi
1.0
I did not finish this book. It takes a lot for me to put a book down before finishing it, but I actively dreaded the thought of picking it up each time.
A Land of Permanent Goodbyes does tell an important, timely story, and to its credit, from the portion I did read, I gained a much clearer intellectual understanding of the conflict in Syria then I have ever had.
Unfortunately, that's just about the only positive thing I can say about it. The characters didn't feel real; they felt like shallow, half-formed puppets created for the sole purpose of explaining the crisis in Syria. As a result, I didn't care as much about them as I would have liked to. Every experience and internal monologue felt like merely a lens through which to view some element of the context their story was set in.
Furthermore, the author's voice was inconsistent and disruptive. She inserts herself into the story to comment on her experiences in the Middle East as a journalist, which, though sometimes informative, take away from the already flimsy story and make it feel like reading an extended news report. On occasion, she makes the even more bizarre choice to talk about humanity in the second-person, saying things like, "That is what is bemusing about humans--often times curiosity drives you to do things you know will haunt you, but you do them anyway. The worst of you take that curiosity to measures that are unfathomable to the best of you. But the Curiosity is in you all" (Abawi 63). This makes it sound as though the narrator is an alien or deity, rather than a human journalist, and it was jarring every time it occurred.
I desperately wanted to like this book. Fiction has so much potential to widen the perspectives of its readers, especially when those readers are young. I hoped this book would be a powerful, vivid story about the experience of Syrian refugees that I could recommend to my students, and I am disappointed that it fell so far short of the mark.
A Land of Permanent Goodbyes does tell an important, timely story, and to its credit, from the portion I did read, I gained a much clearer intellectual understanding of the conflict in Syria then I have ever had.
Unfortunately, that's just about the only positive thing I can say about it. The characters didn't feel real; they felt like shallow, half-formed puppets created for the sole purpose of explaining the crisis in Syria. As a result, I didn't care as much about them as I would have liked to. Every experience and internal monologue felt like merely a lens through which to view some element of the context their story was set in.
Furthermore, the author's voice was inconsistent and disruptive. She inserts herself into the story to comment on her experiences in the Middle East as a journalist, which, though sometimes informative, take away from the already flimsy story and make it feel like reading an extended news report. On occasion, she makes the even more bizarre choice to talk about humanity in the second-person, saying things like, "That is what is bemusing about humans--often times curiosity drives you to do things you know will haunt you, but you do them anyway. The worst of you take that curiosity to measures that are unfathomable to the best of you. But the Curiosity is in you all" (Abawi 63). This makes it sound as though the narrator is an alien or deity, rather than a human journalist, and it was jarring every time it occurred.
I desperately wanted to like this book. Fiction has so much potential to widen the perspectives of its readers, especially when those readers are young. I hoped this book would be a powerful, vivid story about the experience of Syrian refugees that I could recommend to my students, and I am disappointed that it fell so far short of the mark.