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A review by kateisabella
Anatolian Days and Nights: A Love Affair with Turkey, Land of Dervishes, Goddesses, and Saints by Joy Stocke, Angie Brenner
3.0
I have mixed feelings about this book. I am not quite sure what it was trying to be.
I think a lot of readers might be put off by the amount of autobiographical details of the various love affairs of the two authors - although equally well, perhaps this may be a pull to other readers, and frankly, as a woman who has also spent large amounts of time in Turkey, male attention does seem to be an unavoiable part of travelling around as a woman. However, the flip side of this was that the various Turkish people the authors introduced helped make the book feel more authentic, especially when we learned about the views and local histories through the mouths of these characters.
One of the highlights of the book for me was the various historical and mythological details peppered throughout, but these almost seemed to not fit with the rest of the book, which was much more memoir like.
I feel I should have loved this book - it crosses so many of my interests - Turkey, history, mythology and goddesses, but it just didn't quite do it for me. I definitely learned some interesting new things, and the book was great as a spring board for introducing me to new aspects of Anatolian history that I then further researched myself, but the pace of the book seemed at times slow - bogged down with conversations and logistics of travelling, and at other times rushed when only a few lines were dedicated to a fairly unknown piece of history, or Turkish person that they met with.
I think a lot of readers might be put off by the amount of autobiographical details of the various love affairs of the two authors - although equally well, perhaps this may be a pull to other readers, and frankly, as a woman who has also spent large amounts of time in Turkey, male attention does seem to be an unavoiable part of travelling around as a woman. However, the flip side of this was that the various Turkish people the authors introduced helped make the book feel more authentic, especially when we learned about the views and local histories through the mouths of these characters.
One of the highlights of the book for me was the various historical and mythological details peppered throughout, but these almost seemed to not fit with the rest of the book, which was much more memoir like.
I feel I should have loved this book - it crosses so many of my interests - Turkey, history, mythology and goddesses, but it just didn't quite do it for me. I definitely learned some interesting new things, and the book was great as a spring board for introducing me to new aspects of Anatolian history that I then further researched myself, but the pace of the book seemed at times slow - bogged down with conversations and logistics of travelling, and at other times rushed when only a few lines were dedicated to a fairly unknown piece of history, or Turkish person that they met with.