A review by ljesica
Salt Houses by Hala Alyan

challenging emotional informative reflective slow-paced

3.5

 

Someone recently pointed out that I’d never read any books by Palestinian authors.  This wasn’t by design, just something that hadn’t occurred to me.  I try to understand other lives and cultures through books, so I added this one to the list.

It is a story of four generations of a family.  They start in Palestine but are displaced and over the years, the family grows and lives in Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, France and America.  It is a story about family.  It is about survival and having the money to constantly move away from war but also about loving your homeland, wherever that may be.  It starts in 1967 and spans through 2014.  It’s about times changing, technology catching up, cultures and fashion changing.  But mostly it’s about humans.  How no matter how different we are, we’re actually so similar.  It’s about love and loss and those tiny moments that make a life.