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kjcharles 's review for:
I Can't Think Straight
by Shamim Sarif
On the one hand I want to flail and scream about this book because I enjoyed it so much and on the other I want to shake whoever edited it.
It is BRILLIANT FUN. There's rich jetsetting Palestinian Tala in Amman, on her fourth engagement, and middle class British Indian Leyla who works in her dad's insurance company but wants to be a writer. They meet, they fall hard, both have to come to terms with their sexuality and also with the different cultural pressures.
It's an ensemble piece, where the heroines spend more time apart than together. There is a big and beautifully drawn cast: the girls' husbands-to-be (who are both *lovely* and thus not plot drivers, satisfyingly--this is primarily a book about the ways women interact), their gaggle of sisters of varying personalities, and especially the mothers, who are a study in compare and contrast. Tala's mother in particular is a monstrous creation of pride and selfishness and her comeuppance is small but long led up to, and perfect.
It's hugely readable, fantastic storytelling, with a lovely soap-opera compulsive-reading quality and a lovely glow of hope. Also absolutely hilarious at points, I laughed out loud. Not subtle, perhaps, but with good if loudly made points about internalised homophobia and misogyny and cultural oppression (Tala's sister married to a domineering man, quietly starving herself)
And all of the above goes double because it is not entirely easy for the reader to follow the book. I have never seen headhopping like it in my life--there's paragraphs where we switch viewpoint three times!--and in the Kobo version at least there are no scene or line breaks, so you read a paragraph about Leyla in London, move to the next, and discover we're with Tala in Jordan a month later without any indication of a scene change. It is a huge testament to the book's intense readability that this didn't cause me to hurl it across the room.
I enjoyed it wildly ( if I shelve a book as 'soap' that is high praise), but an editor who understands why point of view matters and a decent ebook formatter would make a huge difference to the reading experience.
It is BRILLIANT FUN. There's rich jetsetting Palestinian Tala in Amman, on her fourth engagement, and middle class British Indian Leyla who works in her dad's insurance company but wants to be a writer. They meet, they fall hard, both have to come to terms with their sexuality and also with the different cultural pressures.
It's an ensemble piece, where the heroines spend more time apart than together. There is a big and beautifully drawn cast: the girls' husbands-to-be (who are both *lovely* and thus not plot drivers, satisfyingly--this is primarily a book about the ways women interact), their gaggle of sisters of varying personalities, and especially the mothers, who are a study in compare and contrast. Tala's mother in particular is a monstrous creation of pride and selfishness and her comeuppance is small but long led up to, and perfect.
It's hugely readable, fantastic storytelling, with a lovely soap-opera compulsive-reading quality and a lovely glow of hope. Also absolutely hilarious at points, I laughed out loud. Not subtle, perhaps, but with good if loudly made points about internalised homophobia and misogyny and cultural oppression (Tala's sister married to a domineering man, quietly starving herself)
And all of the above goes double because it is not entirely easy for the reader to follow the book. I have never seen headhopping like it in my life--there's paragraphs where we switch viewpoint three times!--and in the Kobo version at least there are no scene or line breaks, so you read a paragraph about Leyla in London, move to the next, and discover we're with Tala in Jordan a month later without any indication of a scene change. It is a huge testament to the book's intense readability that this didn't cause me to hurl it across the room.
I enjoyed it wildly ( if I shelve a book as 'soap' that is high praise), but an editor who understands why point of view matters and a decent ebook formatter would make a huge difference to the reading experience.