Leila Aboulela

After the untimely death of her husband, Sammar sent her infant boy back to her family in Sudan and stayed in Aberdeen, Scotland, trying to knit her life back together while grieving and working as a translator. One of the professors she often works with is Rae, an Islamic scholar who understand her religion and the way she thinks. It is almost inevitable that the two of them will try to find a way towards each other. Except that for Sammar, Islam is her life - she is born to be a wife and she is Muslim first and anything else after that. Rae on the other hand studies and understands it - but does not believe and does not want to convert (and have a lot of valid reasons besides the fact that he simply does not believe).

That could have been the setup for a wonderful slow burn of a novel. Using the two different settings for the two parts of the novel (the cold Aberdeen and the sunny Sudan) add even more to the feeling of separation. Sammar and Rae do not seem to have anything in common and yet, their connection is there - even when they both deny it. Except that Sammar is unwilling to change and consider anything but what she thinks is right - even if that means never seeing Rae again.

And herein lies the problem. Had the roles been reversed, with the man insisting on his faith and his way and the woman being expected to submit to it and change, the novel would have probably never been published. Writing the novel this way, with Sammar essentially filling that cliched male role of past romance novels, diminishes the power of the novel considerably. It could have been an exploration of faith and religion (not even remotely the same except in Sammar's thinking) and of finding a way to bridge the differences between cultures. Instead it ended up a reversed romance cliche more than anything.

The writing is good and there are a lot of well-written and well-thought sequences in the book. It probably draws on the author's life in places and these insights into her thinking do make up for the strained main story. I just wish she had not tried to mold it so close to the standard stories (with the genders reversed).… (more)