Scan barcode
A review by sdurr
The Secret Sky by Atia Abawi
4.0
This book has been sitting on my YA shelf for almost a year. Because I had nothing else appropriate on my shelves, I grabbed it on the way out the door yesterday for some light bus reading. Was I surprised!
Yes, it's a quick and easy read for me; I breezed through it in a day. But the content was far heavier than I imagined it would be. As I always, I love books that give me characters I truly care about.
Since Sami and Fatima's story share some characteristics of Romeo and Juliet's, I hoped their love story would not with the same useless tragedy. There is tragedy in this novel but Sami and Fatima do not cause the tragedy. Yes. They have the families on opposite sides of a long-running conflict but the families do not have the Montague and Capulet animosity. Yes. They have their version of Friar Laurence but the Mullah is a wise advisor and rather a hero of the story for me. There's even a Paris parallel but he is not the villain of our story. There are many villains -- the one we suspect from the beginning and others we don't expect -- but the worse of them is also the flattest character highlighted in the story. The others are multi-dimensional and very real.
The story and the characters are far more complex than this simple story suggests on the surface -- as complex as the political chaos of modern-day Afghanistan, the setting of the novel.
Abawi almost makes me understand that complex reality of this war-torn country. The only flaw: the only happy ending is escape. I suppose this is a tragedy after all.
Yes, it's a quick and easy read for me; I breezed through it in a day. But the content was far heavier than I imagined it would be. As I always, I love books that give me characters I truly care about.
Since Sami and Fatima's story share some characteristics of Romeo and Juliet's, I hoped their love story would not with the same useless tragedy. There is tragedy in this novel but Sami and Fatima do not cause the tragedy. Yes. They have the families on opposite sides of a long-running conflict but the families do not have the Montague and Capulet animosity. Yes. They have their version of Friar Laurence but the Mullah is a wise advisor and rather a hero of the story for me. There's even a Paris parallel but he is not the villain of our story. There are many villains -- the one we suspect from the beginning and others we don't expect -- but the worse of them is also the flattest character highlighted in the story. The others are multi-dimensional and very real.
The story and the characters are far more complex than this simple story suggests on the surface -- as complex as the political chaos of modern-day Afghanistan, the setting of the novel.
Abawi almost makes me understand that complex reality of this war-torn country. The only flaw: the only happy ending is escape. I suppose this is a tragedy after all.