A review by clarajane
The Girl Who Fell to Earth by Sophia Al-Maria

3.0

I don’t mean to invalidate the author’s experience in any way with this review, but this book just didn’t do it for me, because of the way it’s executed. I went into this memoir with a lot of enthusiasm and curiosity, expecting a coming of age story of someone lost between two culturally-different worlds. As a young woman I related with many passages regarding finding one’s identity during adolescence and especially in relation to one’s own family. Having her mother and father in two different countries, the author finds herself a bit conflicted about feeling responsible for having to please both while exploring her own identity, coming of age, and sexuality. I think it took me some time to finish this one mainly because I found the writing to be a bit overwrought for the content and this made my thoughts stray and the text just repetitively lost me along the way. I was also expecting more cultural elements, and a deeper analysis of the cultural and religious differences regarding growing up in the United States and in Qatar, and in the end, I didn’t feel like I got that from the author. Would still recommend, it really is a unique story.