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Review title: not a historical novel!
Product review: I just finished this book for a class on modern arab lit that I absolutely loved. This book is meant as an alegorical statement of the experience of loss and defeat by "outsiders" so dominant in Arab consciousness, so it shouldn't really be read as a historical novel. But there is something disappointing about the lack of nuance in character development and depth in the story it tells (in fact, it reads a bit like an adolescent novel). It's too bad, because Ashour is a lyrical writer and the subject is a serious one. If you are looking for some serious fiction by women writers from the Arab world, I strongly recommend Huda Barakat and Sahar Khalifeh (Wild Thorns is a classic about why people in Palestine resort to violence even when they abhor it in principle).
