Emily

Beautiful

Revisado: 06-29-22

These stories are wonderful and the narrator is a treasure. I’ve been listening to this book as a comfort for years now after picking it nearly at random out of some Audible suggestions.

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Charming?

Revisado: 03-01-22

This is far more enjoyable than I expected, and I would’ve given it five stars but for the stark heteronormativity, the occasional gratuitous misogyny, and the slurs. They weren’t frequent, but also, just — heads up! They’re there. A lot of it can be attributed to M’s being one of those lovably terrible people types, I guess.

I still listened to the whole thing and parts were definitely really funny, plus some great worldbuilding!

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It’s been a long time since I read anything this beautiful.

Revisado: 01-13-22

The narration was excellent. The story itself was lovely, funny, epic, terribly sad. The writing was so good I kept having to send people quotes. I’m immensely grateful that, in need of a random free audiobook, I picked this for its pretty cover art. I will think about this book for a long time.

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A great book!

Revisado: 09-16-21

The other reviewers seem impatient, or maybe unused to stories that have to set up some background. Yes, the first stories in the beginning seem “disconnected,” but this is done so that once you’re in the middle of the real story, the author doesn’t have to derail for a whole chapter to explain why choosing this particular lawyer is such a big deal, or why the newspapers acted like they did, etc. The pacing is good, and the narration isn’t “dry” or without emotion, it’s just in that true-crime Serious™️ tone you get used to listening to a bunch of these books. I’ve read a few of Schechter’s other books and enjoyed this one quite a bit.

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Excellent analysis!

Revisado: 07-08-21

Really insightful and enjoyable; sometimes these kinds of things make me roll my eyes, they can feel like they’re trying too hard or reaching for something that isn’t there, but this was GREAT. Reasonable, well-thought-out, spot-on. I loved it.

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Weird reading emphasis and needed an editor badly.

Revisado: 01-28-20

The narrator pauses and hitches in bizarre places.

While I found the main story interesting, I nearly could not get through this book for its fearmongering and disingenuous repeated attempt to divorce “sharia” from “fiqh,” as if one was meant to be “IslamIST law” and one a much higher, more proper, acceptable version. Sharia is Islamic law: all of it. The quote from the woman who tells the jihadis that “YOU are the ones who need to follow sharia!” actually... you know, MATTERS in that context, as she’s telling them they are egregiously misinterpreting their own religion.

Anyway, there’s a lot of vaguely racist imagery and phrasing in this book for a story that genuinely does not need cheap, awful tricks to drive home how terrifying it actually must have been. If you care about Islam or intellectual honesty, skip this book.

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