Title: Tell me more, show me less
Review: Erian's teenage protagonist, Jasira, manages 300 pages of first-person narration without revealing much at all about herself except that it feels good to press her legs together. Here we have a 13-year-old girl in a precocious body who turns the heads of grown men, yet seems to live in a social and cultural vacuum. Gee, it would have been fun to get her take on Texas middle-schoolers! But no, what we get is a girl so shy she can't buy her own tampons yet tells her boyfriend she wants to have an orgasm. In every scene, she tells us who sits in which chair (like a stage director) but provides no clue about motivation or context; she lets things happen. Fine, you might say, she's only 13. Yes, but the author isn't 13. She's pushing actors onto a stage, winding them up, and watching them bump into each other. Maybe that's why this reads more like a science report than a novel. A flawed science report at that, since author Erian manages to situate Lebanon in North Africa.
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