Review by Booklist Review
How long of a shadow does childhood cast? That is the question haunting this layered story centering on Ghazaala, who found love as a young girl and forever thirsts for it in adulthood. International Booker Prize--winner Alharthi (Bitter Orange Tree, 2022) uses a looping narrative style to capture the restlessness that drives Ghazaala, who's "not interested in firm ground or hard realities." Ghazaala is a frustrating character, marked by her childhood friendship with her milk sister, Asiya, who leaves the small town where they grew up in Oman after a devastating accident. As an adult, Ghazaala tries to find succor elsewhere, including in the arms of less reciprocative men. In university, alone and divorced, she befriends Harir, a woman who has her own trials to overcome. Ghazaala's heartbreak resonates, but despite being the star of the show, her eternal pining for love feels like an overplayed hand. The best nuggets include a very brief exploration of Oman's water canals and the gripping ending, which adds a hefty dose of pathos and brilliantly anchors a haunting love story.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
International Booker Prize winner Alharthi's eloquent latest (after Celestial Bodies) begins in a rural village in 1980s Oman, where a young mother named Saada rescues an abandoned newborn baby, names her Ghazaala, and takes care of her alongside Saada's 10-month-old daughter, Asiya. Ghazaala's and Asiya's parents then share in raising Ghazaala, and the girls remain close throughout their childhoods. After Saada gives birth to Asiya's younger sister, Zahwa, Saada ignores 11-year-old Asiya, and Ghazaala consoles her. After three-year-old Zahwa drowns in a canal, Saada slips into despair and dies. Asiya founders under the care of her father, whose heavy drinking prompts Ghazaala's parents to forbid Ghazaala from seeing Asiya. Though Asiya never reappears in the book, she's ever-present in Ghazaala's bittersweet memories. The author builds a multilayered and tender portrait of Asiya's lingering impact on Ghazaala, exploring how Asiya's absence makes Ghazaala feel rudderless, causing her to question the expectation that she will feel fulfilled as a wife and mother; and how Ghazaala gains strength from Asiya's memory in moments of struggle, as when she's rebuffed by a lover. It's a worthy entry into the pantheon of stories about female friendship. Agents: Jackie Ko and Emma Herman, Wylie Agency. (Aug.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The latest novel from Alharthi--winner of the International Booker Prize forCelestial Bodies (2019)--explores the lives of three Omani women. The story starts with a nursing mother literally dropping her infant daughter in a moment of shock and grief. The baby is rescued by another villager, Saada, who nurses her with her own daughter, Asiya. Called Ghazaala, or Gazelle, the baby grows up as Asiya's "milk-sister," always preferring her foster mother Saada's household over her own. Then a twofold tragedy strikes, rendering Asiya motherless; she departs the village without saying goodbye, disappearing from Ghazaala's life. As in the justly celebrated and more ambitiousCelestial Bodies, Alharthi employs a circular, layered approach to storytelling. The narrative moves forward and backward in time, sometimes dizzyingly, and covers the lives of many characters. Much of the book is in third person, though one thread is narrated by Ghazaala's university friend Harir. Obsessed by the memory of a mysterious girl who was briefly her neighbor, Harir unwittingly comes into possession of the truth about the tragedy still haunting Ghazaala. Alharthi mines rich material with her details of Omani history, like the country's system of ancient canals and the fortunes once made in pearls; Asiya's drunkard father tells the girls about ghosts in the abandoned mansions of former pearl magnates: "the divers whose lungs had exploded in the depths of the Gulf...the boat captains who'd been weighed down by debt...the English consul, wearing his dust-laden chest medals...the slaves whose backs had been broken by the heft of the pearl caskets." Other sections are less compelling, like Ghazaala's unhappy pursuit of men who remain unavailable and opaque. A book about searching for love--both parental and romantic--and reckoning with the past. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
