khulud khamis

brilliant and unexpected with social criticism

Revisado: 03-26-22

What a brilliant book. Fresh, unexpected, and with a quirky character who doesn't fit what a "normal" person should be or how they should behave. I was rooting for Keiko all the way.

This is a short book, with several layers of social criticism.

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what a gentle book

Revisado: 10-11-21

I enjoyed listening to this in audio. I picked it up because I like reading books about artists. This is such a gentle book. It moves seamlessly back and forth in time in the lives of several people, all connected in one way or another to Mort Lear, a children's books illustrator who had just died. Most of all, I loved the character of Tomasina, his assistant and companion.

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I didn't want this book to end.

Revisado: 10-03-21

What a book. I just didn't want it to end.
This was by far the best audio performance I've listened to.
This is the story of Miss May Belle and her daughter Rue, both healing women. The time period is before, during, and after the Civil War in the South. Slavery, war, freedom. The book alternates brilliantly between these three periods, where the chapters are in dialog with one another. There is just so much in this book: slavery, cruelty, relations between masters and their slaves, punishments, running away and being captured, births, deaths, conjure, hoodoo, haints. But there is also perseverance, kindness, and oh, so much love. The characters were portrayed in such an intimate and believable way, that by the end of the book I felt I knew them well. The ending brought tears into my eyes.

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some mixed feelings about this book.

Revisado: 09-24-21

I have some mixed feelings about this book. I picked it up because I love gardening and the idea that a story was structured around a garden intruiged me, in addition to my love of historical fiction.

What I loved about the book: I loved the female characters, the atmosphere, the description of their challenges.

However, the structure didn't quite work for me. It moved between three time periods, and up until the middle of the book, I had trouble figuring out the characters, as there were so many of them. The switch between the time periods was arbitrary and jarring. It interrupted the flow of the story for me. Also, there was nothing substantial tying these characters together. Usually, when going back and forth in time, I would expect some form of connection or dialogue between the chapters, and there was none here. This being said, I did enjoy the book once I could keep track of the characters.

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brilliant story

Revisado: 09-07-21

What a brilliant story. In a world where gender roles are reversed, this story begins with the criminalization of men's masturbation, and goes on to describe the life of Obbina and Amara, where Amara is an important businesswoman and Obbina the dutiful househusband. The story verges on the absurd, but when we reverse the roles back, we see that this is how our world is in reality. This is one of six stories from the series Black Stars, all of them speculative fiction. I started with this one because I appreciate Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche's writing. Curious to read the other stories in this series.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

painfully beautiful

Revisado: 06-14-21

Listening to Randa Jarrar was like having her in my kitchen over a cup of coffee (or a glass of wine). This is a painfully beautiful memoir, in which Jarrar talks about the most personal experiences in her life, while making connections to wider political issues. Everything in Jarrar's memoir becomes political: from BDSM to giving birth to her son.
She touches on so many issues, and makes connections between them.

Jarrar talks openly about her body and how she is perceived as a queer, brown, fat woman, and so much more, making intricate connections between the personal and the political. This is intersectionality at its best. Jarrar's fragility and resilience touched me on so many levels.

Some of the other issues she talks about: how she received death threats following a tweet following the death of Barbara Bush, in which she called her an amazing racist.

The fact that BDSM is the most safe sex environment for women, while in vanilla, heterosexual sex women are the most exposed to violence and are the least safe.

The abuse and violence she experienced at the hand of her father. How she felt that all her father wanted was for her to shrink. The complex relationship with both her father and her mother.

She talks about her visit to Palestine and how she was eventually deported back to the US, after hours of interrogation at the Ben Gurion Airport.

I loved this book. I felt Randa's pain in my own body, and at the same time her resilience and celebration of herself, her body, and her life.

Randa Jarrar is a queer writer of Palestinian and Egyptian heritage. This is a must-read book for anyone interested in intersectional feminism and queer writing of people of color.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona