Erin reviewed Return of Faraz Ali by Aamina Ahmad
Review of 'Return of Faraz Ali' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
This tipped into melodrama and overwrought language sometimes for me, but I also have a lot of respect for the characterization and the writing.
The main weakness here for me was the number of POVs. Faraz probably gets the most page time, and I wish the story had focused on him. I liked Wajid’s story the least - it added the least to the story. Rosina’s was interesting but felt secondary in page time, thematically quite different, and largely disconnected. Like it could have been a companion novel to this one and I’d have enjoyed it more.
The novel is intentionally set during times of political upheaval in Pakistan and Bangladesh, but I felt that it didn’t really need to be. It didn’t go into it enough for those specific conflicts to be relevant to the story. I never felt like I actually needed to google some context because I …
This tipped into melodrama and overwrought language sometimes for me, but I also have a lot of respect for the characterization and the writing.
The main weakness here for me was the number of POVs. Faraz probably gets the most page time, and I wish the story had focused on him. I liked Wajid’s story the least - it added the least to the story. Rosina’s was interesting but felt secondary in page time, thematically quite different, and largely disconnected. Like it could have been a companion novel to this one and I’d have enjoyed it more.
The novel is intentionally set during times of political upheaval in Pakistan and Bangladesh, but I felt that it didn’t really need to be. It didn’t go into it enough for those specific conflicts to be relevant to the story. I never felt like I actually needed to google some context because I was confused, and I kind of feel like I should have needed to do that. But the conflicts just meant Faraz was in this or that location.
So I think this is really a 3.5 I’m rounding up - I had a couple big qualms.
I definitely cared about both Faraz and Rosina a lot. I felt for their situations, and they both had these impossible choices to make. There’s often no good option, no convenient author-invented way out. But they felt like full people, not just victims, which was a major strength of the story.
Favorite quote:
And they sat before each other, all their wrongs between them, and Faraz wondered if this might be something akin to what love was, in that whatever was said, no one left the room.
