Eight Months on Ghazzah Street : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Thought the book was going to be much better because of the reviews. I was thoroughly disappointed. I didn't get a woman slowly losing it, nor did I get much of a mystery. I got a book that didn't seem to go anywhere in a place that was hot and dirty and confining. The descriptions of her immediate environment (people, places, customs)was interesting, but I was hoping for a knock 'em, sock 'em mystery and instead read a slow plod.

Rating:
Summary: The mystery is ...did the author forget to finish the story?
Review: While I did find the description of the Saudi lifestyles both interesting and disturbing there was little else in this book to hold on to. The supposed "mystery" was never solved or even built up to be any significant part of the story. The overall story could have been written in a magazine article. "Woman goes to Saudi to be with husband who we never get to know." "Neighbors seem odd but we never get to know." "Saudi people have strange social customs - particularly regarding women." "Air conditioning man dies and the story ends and everybody disappears and we don't know why." So what was it I missed?

Rating:
Summary: Negative and exaggerated
Review: With remarkable understatement, a fellow airline passenger tries to prepare Fran Shore for her life as an expatriate wife in Saudi Arabia. A cartographer by profession, she is told, "You're redundant. They don't have maps." As Mantel unfolds the action, and lack of action, which take place in the apartment complex and in the business community, Fran cannot help but try to create mental maps, to make sense of the culture that has enveloped her. Bored and frustrated, she is unable to discover what is really happening in the "empty" flat upstairs, unable to understand the lives which her devoutly Muslim female neighbors accept as completely normal, and so overwhelmed that she wonders, "Am I visible?" And that, perhaps, is the point. She IS visible in a heavily veiled world, destined never to comprehend fully either the daily lives or culture of her hosts, a culture within which she has tried, unsuccessfully, to maintain her own values. As Fran leaves the flat in which she has spent eight months, neither she nor the reader will ever know completely what has happened in the "empty" flat above or in the now empty flats once belonging to her friends. She is forced to accept at last the comment of an Arab acquaintance, "The Kindgom is not a logical world, and besides, logic is not an ornament of young ladies."

Rating:
Summary: With all the veils, few know what is really going on.
Review: With remarkable understatement, a fellow airline passenger tries to prepare Fran Shore for her life as an expatriate wife in Saudi Arabia. A cartographer by profession, she is told, "You're redundant. They don't have maps." As Mantel unfolds the action, and lack of action, which take place in the apartment complex and in the business community, Fran cannot help but try to create mental maps, to make sense of the culture that has enveloped her. Bored and frustrated, she is unable to discover what is really happening in the "empty" flat upstairs, unable to understand the lives which her devoutly Muslim female neighbors accept as completely normal, and so overwhelmed that she wonders, "Am I visible?" And that, perhaps, is the point. She IS visible in a heavily veiled world, destined never to comprehend fully either the daily lives or culture of her hosts, a culture within which she has tried, unsuccessfully, to maintain her own values. As Fran leaves the flat in which she has spent eight months, neither she nor the reader will ever know completely what has happened in the "empty" flat above or in the now empty flats once belonging to her friends. She is forced to accept at last the comment of an Arab acquaintance, "The Kindgom is not a logical world, and besides, logic is not an ornament of young ladies."