Bitter Orange Tree

I enjoyed this overall. Might be 3.5 stars rounded up.

The style is very, very similar to Celestial Bodies, so I'm glad I read this one as a print book, not audiobook. I enjoyed the audiobook of Celestial Bodies, but both books have a lot of characters to keep track of despite the short length of the books. On top of that, I'm not familiar enough with Arabic names. I was struggling to get a handle on them in the audiobook. At least with the print book I could recognize the names faster and flip between chapters easier.

Also like Celestial Bodies, this story is told in vignettes. If memory serves, Celestial Bodies was overall linear, but in this case the story is told nonlinearly. That allows for some "reveals" of a sort.

I found the frame story of Zuhur's grief over her grandmother's death to be really moving. Her grandmother's story and her grandmother's perseverance were some of the best parts of the book. Where it lost its way for me a bit was with Zuhur's friends. They weren't thematically disconnected per se, but I found their dramas less interesting than the generational history I was getting from Zuhur.

There were a few odd things that stuck out, and I'm not sure what to make of them. At one point Zuhur mentions Kermit "from Sesame Street" which threw me off because I know Kermit from the Muppets. Some googling showed me that Kermit was on the first season of Sesame Street, but clearly not enough to be known for it. I'm not sure if that was error that wasn't caught in translation or what.

She also has a throwaway comment about a vegan student in London and the lack of food at her party - that made me roll my eyes. I'm not vegan or even vegetarian, but I regularly eat vegetarian or vegan food. There's plenty of good food to eat. I don't know why there's a perception that there's nothing to eat when you're vegan.

Lastly, the nationality of the students at the university in London is noted multiple times. It was almost never relevant or important. These are characters who don't even speak in the story. I was left wondering why we needed to know that the couple having loud sex were a Nigerian and a Columbian.

Those were minor snags in an otherwise lyrical, beautiful story, but they really stood out to me.

I enjoy how Alharthi tells generational sagas via vignettes, so I'll keep up with her work.