People are the same everywhere

(This book takes place in contemporary Jeddah, a coastal city in Saudi Arabia.) Nouf ash-Shrawi, 16, disappears 3 days before her wedding. A truck and a camel disappear, too. She comes from a wealthy family, and her brother Othman asks his old friend Nayir, a desert guide, to find her. After a couple of weeks Nouf's body is found. When Nayir goes to the coroner's office to claim the body for the family, he overhears an argument between two people: the coroner and a lab assistant, Katya. Nayir, devout and modest, is horrified to see a woman who is unveiled working where she might be with men. But when the police officially close Nouf's case, citing an accidental death by drowning, Nayir and Katya end up working together to track down some unexplained details - things that Nayir couldn't understand about the crime scene, and things that Katya noticed during the autopsy that are being swept under the rug.

What I loved about this book was the realistic way it portrayed the lives of both men and women in a modern and changing Mideastern world -- in a country that is caught between preserving the "old ways" that have identified their culture and the new ideas brought through commerce and communication with the rest of the world. What is one to think about a woman who doesn't recognize that those traditions and rules that were intended to protect her, but rather sees them as stifling? Nayir, who has no experience with women (he is an only child who was raised by his elderly uncle), feels that he is putting his soul at risk as he pursues the truth for the sake of his good friend Othman -- even if it means violating society's rules about men and women being alone together.

This book develops its characters well as it describes the culture and society without judgement. It's also a page-turning mystery. If you like this book, you will probably also like its sequel, City of Veils.

4 out of 4 stars!

A Classic War Protest Novel

I remember loving Vonnegut when I read him in college, so I was eager to get back to him. This was a quick read, but not as wonderful as I had remembered. I agree with other reviewers that this is "threaded with compassion, and behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement." But - he made his points to a fault. Especially irritating was his repeated "so it goes" statement every time someone (or a group of people) died. Although "cute" at the beginning, it brought a feeling of "oh, no, will he say it AGAIN?" dread each time a death was forthcoming. And death there was, as this novel tells about the bombing destriction of Dresden, which was so thorough and horrific that it has been compared to Hiroshima in its brutality. The main character, Billy, lived through the event -- and, in fact, many others in which everyone around him died while he survived. He re-lives the experience through the wonders of time-travel, which he learns from the aliens who kidnap him and display him in a zoo -- the Tralfamadorians. I admired the creativity and humor that permeated throughout the novel, and sympathized with the moral intentions of the author. But Billy was just a doofus of a main character. Read this for its historical perspective (a 1960's look at World War II). 3 out of 4 stars