A couple of years ago, a movie came and went starring Tina Fey called Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, the military call letters for WTF. I didn’t even remember the movie until I went looking for reviews for The Taliban Shuffle after I’d read it. I sometimes like to read reviews after I’ve finished a book, just to see if my thinking is in line with the critics’. One thing I discovered while doing so this time, apart from the fact that the book was made in […]
Beauty, mystery, tradition, belonging and faith
The theme of Deep in the Sahara is simple: An Arab girl of the Sahara who wants to wear a malafa, the veil/dress worn by the women of her faith. She wants to wear the malafa to be like the women of the village, but it is not until she learns what it really means that her mother allows her to wear it. Kelly Cunnane tells you that the malafa represents all the things the girl thinks it is: beauty, mystery, tradition and belonging. But it also means […]
Don’t do me like that
CBR10BINGO: And So It Begins My favorite book series is Iain M. Banks’s Culture. Each book offers a self-contained story of its own time and place within the vast universe of the Culture. Sure, it’s helpful to have the incremental, accumulated knowledge of the Culture that comes from reading multiple books, but you don’t have to keep track of characters and timelines. I also appreciate series like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Vandermeer’s Southern Reach that are really just one long book broken into […]
Remembering for both of them.
There are many ways to approach a review of this book. “Salt Houses” is about a family constantly displaced through the generations by war. It is about the loss of a cultural identity and the struggle to find one. It is about finding who you are and being true to yourself no matter how difficult it may be for those around you. I prefer to think of it as a love story. Steeped in the conflicts of the Middle East from after World War II […]