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A review by worldlibraries
The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif
2.0
There is a good book in here. Indeed, the potential good book could have been extracted and everything else left behind. I found I had to will myself to finish this book and more than half of my friends couldn't finish it. That tells you the boring parts were too much. I found reading this book made me want to write a structural outline of how to tell this story, as the narrative would switch from one century to another and I frequently found I had to reread passages to figure out who was talking. The translator is unnamed. I found some parts of the story seemed to have been translated by someone with a whole higher level of skill than other parts.
Next, to criticize character development. Anna is a lovely character. It is her cross-cultural love story that makes up the interesting part of the story. I found her too perfect though. There aren't many expats in the world who can turn their back COMPLETELY on their home culture and let the family life alone of their new culture be their entire world. I found the idea of that unrealistic. Another character is Isabel, the American who wants to have a cross-cultural relationship with Omar, who is not willing. She gets pregnant and wills a relationship to be. Isabel is an idiot. It made it hard as a reader to identify with her.
Secondly, to criticize subplots that go nowhere. Incest was suggested to have occured in this story. I can't for the life of me figure out why. It most assuredly doesn't draw a reader in to the potential relationship between two people in the book, if one of the people might be ... SPOILER. I didn't understand why the author included this subplot. Is this a common happening in Egypt? I can only conclude that must be so, as why was it included? It sure makes readers recoil. I don't think that's the emotion writers of love stories normally go for.
Another thing that seemed very real in this book is that there is no reward in a place like Egypt for trying to reform it. Since free speech isn't a part of the culture, Egyptians attempting change are silenced in the worst possible ways.
I read this book on a Kindle. One thing Amazon could have done to enhance the enjoyment of reading this book is to have Arabic words used in the text linked to their definitions in the glossary. English language readers don't have Arabic dictionaries loaded on their Kindle so the definitions of Arabic words continued to go unknown unless the reader was 1) aware of the glossary in the back of the book (unlikely), and 2) willing to do the work each time of looking the word up when a link would have made the whole thing super easy.
Next, to criticize character development. Anna is a lovely character. It is her cross-cultural love story that makes up the interesting part of the story. I found her too perfect though. There aren't many expats in the world who can turn their back COMPLETELY on their home culture and let the family life alone of their new culture be their entire world. I found the idea of that unrealistic. Another character is Isabel, the American who wants to have a cross-cultural relationship with Omar, who is not willing. She gets pregnant and wills a relationship to be. Isabel is an idiot. It made it hard as a reader to identify with her.
Secondly, to criticize subplots that go nowhere. Incest was suggested to have occured in this story. I can't for the life of me figure out why. It most assuredly doesn't draw a reader in to the potential relationship between two people in the book, if one of the people might be ... SPOILER. I didn't understand why the author included this subplot. Is this a common happening in Egypt? I can only conclude that must be so, as why was it included? It sure makes readers recoil. I don't think that's the emotion writers of love stories normally go for.
Another thing that seemed very real in this book is that there is no reward in a place like Egypt for trying to reform it. Since free speech isn't a part of the culture, Egyptians attempting change are silenced in the worst possible ways.
I read this book on a Kindle. One thing Amazon could have done to enhance the enjoyment of reading this book is to have Arabic words used in the text linked to their definitions in the glossary. English language readers don't have Arabic dictionaries loaded on their Kindle so the definitions of Arabic words continued to go unknown unless the reader was 1) aware of the glossary in the back of the book (unlikely), and 2) willing to do the work each time of looking the word up when a link would have made the whole thing super easy.