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!

Wanna Get Away?

You might think you want a change - even a drastic change - in your life, but after reading this book, you might be happy with the usual humdrum. The author, an Afghani married to an Indian woman and living in England, really misses the sun, remembers his childhood family vacations wandering in northwest Africa, and decides to capture that geography and less-hectic lifestyle for his own children. He buys a long-unoccupied palace in the middle of a shantytown in Casablanca and embarks upon the overwhelming task of renovating the palace. He inherits a group of employees and soon is forced to hire many more -- and let's just say that this man was not born to be a boss. He is soon pushed around by all the carpenters, tile-layers, "guardians," as well as the cook, the nanny, and his professional assistant, Kamal. This assistant somehow cuts through red tape, gets things done, and navigates Tahir through many back alley deals -- but he, too, exhibits his own Moroccan way of working -- he doesn't show up for days, and then appears seemingly out of nowhere with a long-missing but absolutely essential document or permit. Besides the employee problem, Tahir also faces the obstacle of superstition about evil spirits -- especially the evil Jinn (i.e. genie) which inhabits his palace. Tahir adjusts to the fact that the uneducated workers are obsessed by the need to placate the Jinns, but as he meets other people whom he respects, he discovers that this superstitious belief is universal throughout Morocco.

This book is a series of funny anecdotes interspersed with history, culture, geography, and travel. If you enjoy reading to spread your awareness and to travel to new places, you will love this book. I did -- and I've heard that his newer book, In Arabian Nights, is even better. I give this 4 out of 4 stars.