Powerful and emotionally insightful family saga

filled star filled star filled star filled star star unfilled
mgrosser Avatar

By

This richly detailed, epic novel tells the story of the Nasr family as they reunite in Beirut for their grandfather's memorial and possible sale of the family house. The Nasr family's story has all the best elements of a family drama: there are deeply held secrets, rifts, old resentments, loyalties, and complicated love. However, this novel is also a tale of the Arab American immigrant experience and the complicated pull of a homeland ravaged by violence, yet brimming with culture, life, nostalgia, and for some, lingering guilt.

The novel follows the lives of Mazna, an aspiring Syrian actress, and her husband Idris, a Lebanese heart surgeon, before and after immigration to Southern California, and the lasting impacts of their choices on their three (now adult) children. The story is not told chronologically - we actually meet the adult Nasr children first through alternating chapters from the perspectives of each. As readers, we do not experience Mazna's perspective until the second part of the book, and the story continues to weave between past and present as gradually all secrets are revealed.

For a story told from so many perspectives, each character is remarkably well-developed. The Nasrs are wonderfully complicated and realistically flawed, at times unlikeable yet also unavoidably relatable. They feel like a family you might know. Resentments between siblings, parents and children, and husband and wife are gradually unspooled and the reader begins to understand what truly lies behind the decisions and behaviors of each character.

The alternating timeline and character perspectives worked well for establishing vivid settings and a slower-paced yet engrossing narrative, keeping the reader always waiting for the next secret to be revealed. By inhabiting so many complex characters, the author was able to touch on an almost overwhelming range of themes: the complicated politics of the Middle East (even the locals didn't seem to fully understand all the players), treatment of Palestinian refugees, close juxtaposition in the Middle East of normal life and occasional affluence versus the fallout of war and refugee camps, the immigrant experience and the concept of "home", the loss of one's homeland, social/financial class systems in the US and the Middle East, the LGBTQ experience in the Middle East, sibling bonds and rivalries, and the complicated relationship between a husband and wife with buried secrets but a lifetime of shared experiences.

This was, at its core, a truly human story. Its vivid insights into the universality of family dynamics and human emotion will likely draw many readers into the lasting impact of decades of conflict in Syria and Lebanon more than any news reporting could.