A word of love book

I gave this 165 pages and stopped. The plot didn’t seem to be moving forward with any momentum. And given how short the book is and the fact that it is written in short vignettes, I really felt more should have happened in the pages I read.

actual rating: 4.5 stars

This was beautiful and lyrical. I loved how you really felt the importance of language in the story. It was really very beautiful.

A Word for Love was a recommendation from a friend. And for that I thank her. This book makes the reader to consider how a home can become a prison, a world and with love a universe. I would like to share A quote from the book that touched me deeply, «I have memory and it follows me, but we don’t choose our memories,only how we carry them.»
A beautiful book.

All my reviews can be found at ivereadthis.com

Happy Valentine’s Day! A book review of a love story is in order. Luckily, I just received a beautiful novel called A Word for Love by Emily Robbins in the mail, and I read it in a mere few days in anticipation of getting this review out ASAP. Believe me, this book is pretty inside and out (rose gold lettering-fabulous!)

Although the book’s setting is never actually named, it’s understood that it takes place in Damascus (according to the marketing materials), right before the unrest began. A love story in Syria you say? What better time for a book like this to come out? What a treat that we can learn about the actual lives of people in Syria, rather than viewing horrific videos of their tragedies online and seeing them merely as a statistic. Experiencing love is what makes us human, and I think we all need a little reminder of our shared humanity, no matter where you live. Yes, physical danger plays a role in this plot line, but it’s love that takes the spotlight: romantic AND familial love.

What’s more unique about this book is the fact that we learn about the lovers from an outside perspective. The narrator is a young American girl named Bea who travels to Syria to study Arabic. She lives with a family in their dusty apartment along with a hired housekeeper from Indonesia named Nisrine. She catches the eye of the policeman named Adel, who patrols the station on the other side of the street across from this family’s home. Unfortunately, Nisrine is rarely allowed to leave the apartment, so their romance blooms from stolen glances, shouts across the street and even a rare poem or two.

I won’t spoil anything for you, but it’s no surprise that things don’t turn out perfectly for them (this is explained within the first few pages of the book, so don’t blame me for dashing your hopes). And I should be clear that this isn’t a romance novel. There is barely any sex, in fact the two barely get to touch (maybe that was a spoiler of sorts?).

So because this story takes place before a war breaks out, there is political intrigue abound, and danger lurks at every corner. There are in fact, jokes about car bombs more than once (insert awkward laughter here). However, we don’t dwell in the impending violence of the area, instead the book is written almost as if the characters are all in a dream. We don’t get bogged down by details, in fact sometimes it’s difficult to discern what’s really going on in some spots, so we drift along in a hazy bubble, focused on Bea’s hopeless wish for love and her fascination with the language of love in general. That was probably my favourite part of this book: Bea’s focus on reading this one particular love poem in Arabic, and her education in the Arabic language and culture. For instance; they drink coffee late at night apparently…you learn something new every day!

Bea is an exchange student, living in Syria with a host family, including the loving but sometimes stern Madame, the politically active (and once imprisoned!) Hassan, and the family maid, Nisrine. When Nisrine becomes entangled with a policeman who works across the street, the family becomes entangled in politics and broken hearts that will leave a mark on Bea forever.

My favorite aspects of this novel (much like The Kite Reader, which I read only recently) are moments where the story shakes Bea a little as an American visitor (and thus me as an American reader): she doesn’t know how to navigate the city library, or in one central moment, where Madame reveals something important to Bea in an aside, but Bea only understands in part because she hasn’t mastered the language yet. Sometimes the novel settles for broad strokes about the human condition; my favorite moments come from the narrower strokes, those surprises.

Nisrine, Madame and Hassan, and the policeman Adel are all very well-drawn characters, and I enjoyed learning about each of them. The ending made me wish that the novel’s viewpoint was somehow more expansive —I found myself sharing the claustrophobia that entangles Bea and Nisrine at some points. I also felt that one character got short-shrift from the ending, a victim of coincidence rather than tragedy. However, A Word for Love is a great coming-of-age story, made all the more interesting for its insights into a world I’ve never been to but have always been curious about.

Probably the most uniquely written book I’ve read. It’s almost poetry. The author’s voice almost sounds foreign, which contributes to the book’s setting and plot. She really has immersed herself in the culture of her host country.

I wanted to love this. On a prose level the writing is very lyrical and beautiful. I love some of the ideas here, especially the way the story of Adel and Nisrine comes to echo the story of Leila and Qais, but I never felt connected in any way to the narrator and at a certain point I found the plot to be very slow. It reminded me in a way of Dave Egger’s Hologram for the King which did that sort of intentionally, but it’s something I disliked in both books. I wanted to love it but ultimately found myself less engaged than I wanted to be.

Emily Robbins’ debut novel is a mesmerizing read…a hauntingly beautiful love story, overflowing with the richness of language, culture, family, friendship.

Another meh read.
In the first half of the book nothing really happened. The plot kinda began and then slowly dragged its way through.
It gave the feeling of how family matters and blah, blah, blah, about the life in Syria and people there, but the plot surrounding that «astonishing text» didn’t really go anywhere. Not to mention that the romance was a bit ridiculous, as was the actual getting to the text.
The second half was just disappointing, overly lyrical/poetic writing that was bothersome and super dramatic love story that ends with, guess what? , death
It really wasn’t anything special, just sounded intriguing.

A beautifully written story of love, loss and the power of language. The story takes place in a Syrian city, modelled after Damascus, and is told from the point of view of an American student, studying the Arabian language, who has arrived to read “The Astonishing Text”, an historic love story that is said to move all who read it to tears. She lodges with a Syrian family and with her living arrangements she, and the reader, become intimately familiar with the Syrian culture and all the various forms of love. “It is said there are ninety-nine Arabic words for love” and so the story begins…..

I flew through this book yet for a book ostensibly about words, I am at a loss for words upon finishing it. I can’t describe easily my reactions. Love the characters in this many layered love story. Not a deep book really but not light either. I think I recommend it but for those with a flare for the arts and maybe for the classics.

Beautiful. Lyrical. Lost sense of time and place while reading this.

3.5
At many times this was a struggle for me to finish.
The writing was luminous and poetic and beautiful. The story just moved very very slow and plot points aren’t huge since all the main characters spend the vast majority of their time inside their home (I guess in that regard it’s amazing that there was a story at all!)
A lot of poetic thoughts and philosophizing about love.

Having had exchange students and vicariously hearing the experiences of 3 of my children who each went to different countries for a year, the story of someone who would intentionally go to Syria to stay with a family and work on learning Arabic was interesting. Bea thought she would be able to attend a University and get to see and read a most important poem in the Library of what was probably Damascus. Instead, she was enclosed, often lo0cked into a 5th floor apartment where the view of the city was primarily from a balcony. Growing up as an only child, this was a time when she learned what is was to be part of a family of 3 children, two parents and a maid. She also learned how restricted life could be at a time when what one said had to be carefully thought about because politics were entering a revolutionary change.

One of her biggest maturing factors was loving from a distance and watching the maid from Indonesia find distance love while Bea worked on being generous by allowing the maid, Nisrine, to be the one loved. Unusual story of a place that is so often in the news.

This review originally appeared on the book review blog justonemorepaige.wordpress.com.

A Word for Love was the February book from Muse Monthly. I realize it’s now June…don’t judge. It sat on my shelf for months and, I’ll be honest, was on my TBR list but nowhere near the top. But then a good friend and incredible supporter of this blog, someone who has given me more positive feedback and taken more of my book suggestions than almost anyone else (thank you!), asked me if I had read it. She said she had just finished it and that it was one of the most beautiful and best written love stories she’d ever read. Well, with that kind of recommendation…I started it the very next day.

To start off, I’d like to just say that I literally cannot think of a single truly negative thing to say about this book. For all that it was not what I was expecting, and definitely not one of those «I literally cannot put it down» novels, it’s also one of the most polished reads I’ve ever experienced. The writing style is difficult to describe, a combination of sparse and picturesque, a bit like long verse poetry masquerading as prose. I just read my first book of poetry earlier this year, and that is definitely the most closely related style that I can think of. And truly, it’s gorgeous. Plus, having studied Arabic for years, much of the discussion of vocabulary, of how hidden meanings appear when you look at the similar roots for words that on the surface appear so distant, was a joy to read and digest. The inclusion of those word philosophies and connections gave a wonderful extra depth and dimension to the story. I read at the end that the author, who studied in Syria and has lived in various countries across the Middle East, was a student of anthropology. That didn’t surprise me at all, based on her inclusion, and descriptions of, many small but meaningful cultural practices. And it actually helped explain some of the moments that I found the most poignant, when our main character notices the small things that can speak volumes, but are usually overlooked. For example, I recall a lovely passage where items like empty juice glasses left out on a counter are reverently described as «charms» of daily life. 

Throughout the book, we watch the blossoming, if you will, of a distant, forbidden, love between two characters. A love that, similar to that of Romeo and Juliet (forgive the obvious and mostly overdone reference), is purely visual, from afar, grows quickly out of a bit of desperation in the face of the forbidden, and proceeds quickly to dramatic overtures of affection and eventual tragedy. It’s a classic story, but for me, also superficial. What was more deeply felt, I thought, was the observer role. Our main character and narrator, Bea, travels to Syria to study the language. She is obsessed with the construction and meaning of words and has the single minded goal of seeing and read «the astonishing text,» an Arab love story, the manuscript for which is said to bring all readers to tears. She romanticizes the text to an extreme and imagines herself in the role of the female protagonist, finding her true love, often. As the story progresses, Bea ends up realizing that she is, at least in the story we are reading, not the protagonist, but the supporting character. She is the one who observes the love unfolding and survives its cataclysms to tell the tale. Mirroring the astonishing text that she came to read, she is the shepherd, the friend, and ultimately the author of the written tale. And perhaps, for being on the outside looking in, learned more about love than those directly in its thrall. 

All the reviews and comments, from such well known authors as Khaled Hosseini, and of course my friend, talked about how this was, essentially, a love story written as an ode to love. And I can see that. But for as much as this book talked about, was about, love, there is a section at the end where the author spends some time talking about loss. And for me, that’s what hit home more than anything else. There is a thin, if present at all, line between love and loss, for one cannot necessarily fully be experienced without the existence of the other. And each character in this story has just as much loss, if not more, as they have love. What this books really explores is that dual space. One of the passages in that section about loss talks about love being something you feel, not something you read. But when that is gone, when the loss of that love has come, then all you have left is words. And though all you can do is write about love because there is nothing else left, from that loss spring the most beautiful words about love. So I saw this book as an ode to love, yes, but from page one, it is love through the eyes of loss. That’s what struck me as the biggest takeaway, and perhaps the biggest difference in impression between myself and the other reviews/recommendations I got. However, regardless of that difference, nothing can take away from the beauty with which this particular story about love was written.
___________________

I feel like I’ve been on a roll lately with the ethereal type novels, where the language is as important, if not more so, than the story itself. And with all books like that, I feel compelled to share a number of quotes illustrating that. Because without understanding the beauty of the language, you are not getting a full feel for the book (even with my phenomenally written reviews, of course). So, here are some of the passages that struck me most as I read A Word for Love:

«To My Flower, the Jasmine. Peace to the one with hair like dusk falling. Even her Sweat smells Sweet.» p.62

«But there is a lightness to love, even when it’s not your own. There is camaraderie in waving. She took my hand. Adel stood on one side, we stood on the other, waving and waving.» p.125

«Nisrine once told me about a word that meant maid, and heroine, and moveable house. It was not from her language, it was from her mother’s, who came from a different island. But in Nisrine’s town, the concept was the same. …A moveable house was like a maid’s, or a heroine’s, heart. It had to be flexible, but strong, no matter the surroundings; for those who counted on it, to always be a home.» p.125

«Theirs had always been a faraway love; she had taught him the beauty of two eyes, ready, waiting to be given.» «Theirs had always been a faraway love. She’d taught him the power of a look, of two eyes ready, waiting to be given.» p.136/151

«His heart swelled and swelled, until it was so full it stopped, because there was no room for beating.» p.150

«…I love you so much, I can feel your soft soul all around me, it’s like being covered in the most beautiful flower.» p.152

«There is a letter in Arabic that stands for silence. It is called the hamza; its shape is a half-moon, or a teardrop, and like a teardrop it asks you to pause a moment, and breathe. It opens up space. … His face hurt. His side hurt. But his mind was a hamza, his arms open. …all Adel could remember was a dark hip, a surprising feeling. He dug into the memory. He let it cover him.» p.233

«As as I began to read I, too, felt joy; I saw each word and met it, joyfully, with understanding.» p.265

«I thought back to all the moments without words that I held in my heart, and I thought, Of course. Why did I study words that meant love? Love is not in what is said, but what is done, what is felt and experienced, it is the intimacy of silent moments, of small meanings.» p.268
«This is the problem with missing: it doesn’t stay in one place, but spreads out and changes the landscape.» p.278

«And, what if the love that we found was not meant to be shared just between two people, but by many; a fiery, starry substance that grows when it’s kindled, so that the more you love and are beloved, the more light?» p.279

This was disappointing, for a few reasons but mainly because I see such potential in this book. Syria is not exactly a place that a lot of novels are set in, or TV show or movies dare to explore. So this interested me because of how rare it is. I was expecting to get a glimpse of Syrian culture in the midst of a romantic tale. There was some of that, but the story itself in my opinion wasn’t executed well.

While reading the story felt disorganized, all over the place. It was like reading someone’s jumbled thoughts and life experiences, which to be fair this sort of is, but I couldn’t get attached to anything, every time I started to get into the story I was ripped away from it to observe something else. Which lead to me getting bored, which in turn made reading each page more difficult.

Another oddity I noticed was that the dialogue at times seemed awkward and unnatural. It reminded me of playing a Japanese video game from the 90’s that was loosely translated into English, it just felt off, like if it was said in its original language it would make sense but in English it doesn’t. This often pops up when Adel is talking to his parents, but also when we are meant to feel his pain for not being able to be with the woman he loves, the awkward dialogue destroys these moments.

For the most part I didn’t really get to know the characters enough to say it I liked them or not, that could be the disorganization’s effect. Everybody seemed okay, but the person who I couldn’t stand was Adel, a character who was apart of one of the love stories in this novel. Throughout the novel his love was compared to ancient love story about a man you couldn’t have the woman he loved, he was a character you should feel bad for, but in Adel’s case that fell flat. Adel came off as obsessive and pathetic, the begging and pleading made me hate him. His behavior alone was huge reason I couldn’t really get into the story.

Overall I can’t say I recommend this book, I do feel like I bashed this book into the ground and I hate that. I don’t like saying so many bad things about a book I know takes a very long time to write, but I have to be honest. Though there are a lot of things I don’t like, there are beautiful sentiments of love, family, and culture (which I love) scattered throughout this book, I just wish they were enough to outweigh the bad.

This book dazzles with its clean and poetic prose. I found myself swept into the lives of Bea, Nisrine, Madame, Baba, and the children within their home. As a student of Arabic, I was particularly drawn to Robbin’s interweaving of reflections on learning the Arabic letters, and how those shapes and sounds became imprinted on her experiences abroad. However, I think there is something to love in this book for all readers, not just Arabic students or people familiar with the Middle East. It is a story of love, of how mounting societal unrest manifests in one home, on the tensions between writing and memory and experiencing, of feeling deeply, and of navigating gaps in culture and language in interpersonal relationships.

This was definitely a story worth telling, but I don’t think it was told in the best manner.

Namely, the author does a lot of posturing with the stream of consciousness style which often makes passages overladen with contrived meaning. Additionally, despite the author’s and narrator’s backgrounds, there is very little reflection on language that extends past what one would expect from a college freshman with a surface level understanding of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

I found that the last third of the book was much more engrossing than the first two thirds, but it tended to be a slog to get to that point.

WHY didn’t we get more about «The Astonishing Text»?? That’s the whole reason Bea is in Syria!

Recensione completa su tiserveunlibro.blogspot.com/2019/02/l…

— Anch’io piangerei se avessi la sua età. Ma ora, se tu dovessi andartene domani, non piangerei. Forse, non ti telefonerei neppure.-
-Perchè no?-
— Perchè sono un adulto. Non penso con le emozioni, ma con il cervello.»

» In quel paese quando ami qualcuno lo chiami con il tuo stesso nome.»

» Vedi, gli uomini pensano che sia bello essere gelosi, ma mia madre sapeva che amare significa fidarsi. E prendersi cura e non avere segreti.»

Bea è una ragazza americana ma ama molto la cultura araba e per questo va a studiare la lingua e la cultura presso una famiglia di Damasco (città che non nomina mai col suo nome, chiamandola semplicmente «città straniera» o «quella città».)
A casa di Madame, di Hassan (Baba) e dei suoi figli, Bea impara a vivere come loro, a parlare come loro, e soprattutto conosce Nisrine, la giovane e bella domestica indonesiana che ammalia tutti con la sua bontà ed eleganza.
Le due ragazze diventano molto amiche, si aiutano a vicenda, e si innamorano dello stesso soldato biondo che sorveglia la caserma sotto il loro palazzo. Per Nisrine si tratterà di un amore tanto platonico quanto potente, e Bea dovrà presto accettare che il soldato, Adel, sia perdutamente innamorato della giovane indonesiana.
Da qui inizierà ad essere testimone appassionata e silenziosa del loro amore, dei loro dialoghi a distanza, delle poesie arabe che Adel scriverà per la sua innamorata.
L’amore non sarà purtroppo l’unica realtà a lei sconosciuta che si troverà ad osservare; il marito di Madame è un esponente della parte rivoluzionaria del Paese, e la loro realtà quotidiana è fatta di sospetti, paure, tentativi di una vita normale mescolati ad un riserbo e ad una sorta di continua finzione, fino a quando la situazione del Paese, e della famiglia stessa, comincerà a precipitare costringendola ad un rientro forzato in America, ben prima della fine della sua vacanza studio.

(….) continua

A mesmerizing debut set in Syria on the cusp of the unrest, A Word for Love is the spare and exquisitely told story of a young American woman transformed by language, risk, war, and a startling new understanding of love.
It is said there are ninety-nine Arabic words for love. Bea, an American exchange student, has learned them all: in search of deep feeling, she travels to a Middle Eastern country known to hold the «The Astonishing Text,» an ancient, original manuscript of a famous Arabic love story that is said to move its best readers to tears. But once in this foreign country, Bea finds that instead of intensely reading Arabic she is entwined in her host family’s complicated lives—as they lock the doors, and whisper anxiously about impending revolution. And suddenly, instead of the ancient love story she sought, it is her daily witness of a contemporary Romeo and Juliet-like romance—between a housemaid and policeman of different cultural and political backgrounds—that astonishes her, changes her, and makes her weep. But as the country drifts toward explosive unrest, Bea wonders how many secrets she can keep, and how long she can fight for a romance that does not belong to her. Ultimately, in a striking twist, Bea’s own story begins to mirror that of «The Astonishing Text» that drew her there in the first place—not in the role of one of the lovers, as she might once have imagined, but as the character who lives to tell the story long after the lovers have gone.
https://www.fahasa.com/

What an odd book. I’ve just finished it and can’t even really describe it.

It’s about an American girl doing a home stay program in a middle eastern country (never named, but might be Syria based on the Acknowledgements) who lives with a very strange host family. This girl never stands up for herself at all. She seems to have an emotional infatuation with the family’s maid. She’s essentially there to study a particular library text, but the story mainly focuses on almost journal-like snippets of her life. She almost never goes outside so it’s largely a story about the family and their interactions.

When you find get to what seems like the end, there are a dozen more wrap ups. It just never seems to end!! The character comes to a realization that words aren’t always enough, and yet then the author uses many many more pages full of words to try to describe indescribable things. Tough to get through when you’re finally about to wrap things up, and packing all the ‘profound realizations’ into one chapter meant there were a lot of boring chapters to get there.

I was interested in this book bc I wanted to read more about the Middle East from a cultural point of view, but this is really missing that aspect. It’s basically a ‘story within a story parallel’ with an unlikeable narrator. Didn’t vibe with me, but might with a more academic person who is into analyzing the actual writing. I can see how it was meant to be beautiful and lyrical and a great piece about love and loss etc etc but missed the mark for me.

2.5/3 Stars

Love is a wide open space. That it can be friendship and passion and leaving unrequited all at once

This month my goal has been to read books that portray love in its various forms; from familial to romantic, friendships and the love for one’s home. I feel like A Word for Love encompassed all those things, but it failed to wow me or leave an impression on me as a reader.

The writing has an elegance but it is also simple and in certain instances quite deep. However I believe I never connected with the characters. Sometimes their speech seemed robotic and I couldn’t relate to it. Furthermore while this book is advertised as taking place in Syria, the audience is never told that it takes place there. The country and the city are unnamed so I think not going into any sort of details about Syria or the city (I assumed it was Damascus) was quite disappointing, especially considering how much could have been explored.

I also do not think the book it did itself any favours by having the climax of the novel close to the end of the book. For me because of that the whole story felt unresolved. Perhaps that was intentional; love does not always come to a happy conclusion. Instead it’s messy, tragic , confusing and everything in between.

Overall I wouldn’t say this was a favourite book, but I do not regret reading it. I just hoped for more from it.

This is a difficult book to categorize and that made it initially intriguing. A Word for Love is a story set in Syria, told in the first person by American student Bea. Studying the Arabic language, Bea has chosen this location of unrest because she wishes to read a love story in its original text that is kept in the national library. This story has deep meaning that brings everyone to tears when they read the original. Bea billets with a local family and their maid and is treated as one of their own children. Both Bea and the maid are in love with a blond policeman stationed across the way from the house. Bea reminds us that there are ninety-nine words in Arabic for love, indeed the nuances of the language allow for deeper expressions than English. Bea’s narrative is told in brief, staccato sentences that detracted from the story for me. At times I needed to reread entire pages to make certain I understood who was talking to whom. Author Robins gives us a peek into what it is like to live in a city of political unrest, where a slip of the lips may land you in jail and that no one is to be trusted…even those we love.

I really enjoyed this book. It was exquisite and delicate and worked so well for me, its slender music weaving with my soul. This is the kind of literary fiction I appreciate: smooth, reflective, set in a generic WestAsian country, read by Julia Whelan…what is not to like? There are conversations to be had about cultural appropriation and this kind of story, but I am not the right person to have them, so I will say this: this made me think lots about Arabic and Arabian culture, and I do not think it fell into either trope of West Asia: reducing it to a nest of violence, or saying that it is all beauty and wisdom. Robbins challenges the culture, and Bee is very brave, and the story unfolds in a way that feels right.
At the end of the day, everyone feels like a shepherd: like the love story is something they nurture, and not part of their own life. I feel like that frequently, and what is most compelling about this story is how Emily Robbins writes about the various natures of being an outsider. For that, this book is something to cherish.

I had never heard of this book, but the blurb really intrigued me. Unfortunately, it fell flat for me. It’s about 300 pages long but felt very dragged out. For the first half of the book, nothing really happens, then quite a lot happens at the end. I didn’t like the writing style — it was definitely very poetic but it mainly felt rambling and boring.
I had no interest in the characters, and the romance which the whole story is centered around seemed so unrealistic. The main character is a university student but acts and thinks like a teenager — she is very naive and desperate for love. I also didn’t really understand how she went on a study abroad without any actual studying lined up? The university doesn’t reply to her so she just goes anyway and goes to a tutor once a week, like that’s an equivalent replacement that her university would accept?

It’s a shame that I didn’t enjoy this book because it sounded so promising and I think that if it had been better written, it has the potential to have been excellent.

šī grāmata manās rokās nonāca pavisam nejauši, bet acīmredzot tam bija iemesls.
ļoti raita valoda un ātri attopies jau pēdējās grāmatas lappusēs.
stāsts savu gaitu iet pašpl��smā, nav jāiegulda laiks analizējot notikumus un varoņu rīcības, bieži tiek atgādināts, kas notika pirms 10 vai 20 lappusēm, ja nu piemirsies, un pasniegti arī kopsavilkuma teikumi, ja nu apjuki notikumos vai nespēji izsecināt kopsakarības.

lai gan valoda, pasniegšanas veids, pārdzīvojums un emocionālais aspekts kopumā man ļoti patika un patiešām aizskāra, tomēr varoņos vērojamā stagnācija un kāpšana uz vieniem un tiem pašiem grābekļiem man tomēr traucēja. bieži vien likās: “mēs taču šajā situācijā jau bijām 47lpp, Nisrine, saņemies!”

četras zvaigznes, jo vairāk subjektīvi…
bet iesaku, ja pietrūkst skaistuma un atpūtas no “nopietnās un smagās” literatūras.

“love is wide-open space. that it can be friendship and passion and leaving and unrequited all at once.”

This isn’t normally the kind of book I would pick up but that is the blessing of book subscription boxes. I got this one years ago when Muse Monthly was still going. It’s too bad I already drank the tea that came along with it!

The story follows an American exchange student in Damascus, Syria, just as the country is about to enter into civil war. It is never openly said that this is where it takes place but it says so on the book jacket. Overall, it’s not a book where a tremendous amount happens. Mostly, it is the simple day-to-day life of the family Bea is staying with, her love for Arabic, and her wanting to read «the Astonishing Text» which is a famous love story. She watches as the maid in the house falls in love with the policeman who works across the street at the station. Their story kind of parallels the one in «the Astonishing Text».

It’s a lyrical book, the writing is gorgeous, but it is slow.

WHEW, I finished my reading challenge!!

This book was so disappointing for me, not the worst I’ve ever read but it just left me feeling so hollow. Being set in Syria I was expecting to get a deeper sense of the setting, to be transported there, but instead the descriptions are shallow and the characters almost never leave their house. The main issue for me though was the actual love story. The book is short and the writing style choppy (intentionally I think) but on top of that the relationship between the two «lovers» was so rushed I couldn’t believe or get into it at all. Moreover it was plagued by bad decisions and felt like immature infatuation rather than the «true love» it was supposed to be. The ending just made me angry. Overall like most of the books I don’t like A Word For Love just felt like wasted potential for a great story.