Author: JC Carleson
Publisher: Random House Children's
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
This is a first person PoV story of Laila, a 15-year-old girl from what we learn is a Muslim nation. Her father was deposed from his dictatorial rôle and killed, leaving Laila, her mother, and her six-year-old brother to escape, courtesy of the CIA. They are now resident in a nondescript apartment outside of Washington DC in the USA, trying to cope with the massive shift in their circumstances and perspective.
Laila mulls over her feelings daily. Her disturbing discovery of what a brute her father was is one thing which hits her rather quickly. Information is much more freely available in the USA, notwithstanding the ignorant whining of conspiracy theorists. There is a problem here though, and it centers upon the question of whether Laila is ignorant or simply dumb. Yes, she's only fifteen, but for her to have grown up in the palace and not even happened upon so much as a whiff of a rumor about the true nature of her father's regime is simply not credible, especially not given her personality. But then Carleson gave her an inconsistent personality which cannot be explained away solely by her being a fifteen-year-old Muslim girl.
Laila has problems adjusting to life in the west, including getting a good handle on what it's like to live in a society where overkill is the norm (with store shelves flooded with endless variations on a single product, for example), and where women dress like "whores" (so her countrymen would say). Normally I'm not a fan of 1PoV stories, but in this one, it actually works. Laila's narration keeps the story moving and it isn't done in the most fake way possible by pretending it's a diary or letters; it's simply told like she's talking on the phone to a friend, and it's told in short bursts each centered around one theme. It unnerves us as much as she is unnerved because there is always something happening. Reminiscent of her home nation perhaps, Laila does not stand on cement or asphalt here, but upon shifting sand.
Laila is constantly taken by surprise by events: by for example, being unexpectedly introduced to a guy at school who was staring at her. His name, is Ian! Her discomfort with him reminds me of a time I went over to a friend's house and sat on the floor by another girl (since the room was crowded and there was nowhere else to sit). This girl, who was American, got into trouble with her Middle Eastern boyfriend because she remained sitting there, and did not move away from me! Yes, he thought he owned her! I cannot understand why girls tolerate, much less date boys like that. Not all boys and men who behave in so possessive a fashion come from the Middle East of course, and while in that area of the world, the girls may have little recourse against this behavior, in the USA, they do. They have every choice, not least of which is because not everyone who moves here from the Middle East is like that, so there is no reason not to make a wiser choice and still get what you want.
The problem for Laila is that the US government isn't getting what it wants, and an unscrupulous man named Gansler (maybe that's his name, maybe it isn't!) puts pressure on Laila rather than on her willful mother, Yasmin. Her mother is talking with people upon whom she would have spit just a few months before, had she met them in her own country. Perhaps she has a plan, but she hasn’t shared it with Laila. She's also pressuring Laila to make nice with the young boy who visits with these men, because he seems to be trying to derail whatever plans Laila's mother is trying to make, out of purest animosity. The simple solution would be to un-invite him from these meetings, but once again the pressure is on Laila to distract a boy who evidently hates her!
Here's where this novel goes off the rails rather too much for me. This is one of those absurd issues where there is hatred and suddenly there is no hatred in its place with no noticeable transition or rationale for such a transition. I can't believe that a young, headstrong male like Amir, with that much hatred in his eyes, would suddenly start talking to a young female like Laila for no reason whatsoever, and especially not when they're alone and unsupervised.
I started losing faith in the "reality" of this novel when Laila is talked into going to a dance with three girls from her school. Beforehand, they play dress-up with Laila ending-up in somewhat skimpy clothing which was entirely in keeping with fashion for an American teen girl, but entirely inappropriate for her, yet she plays along with this, pretending that she's acting - that she's really someone else in costume, not herself. I can see how a slightly rebellious teen like Laila, especially one who is displaced and is almost mesmerized by what she finds around her, would go for this, but it seemed far too easy. It seemed that she gave in to this far more readily than seemed in character for her, given what we’ve been told about her, and her internal monologue, but that wasn't the worst part. The worst was that Amir was also at the dance. Given what we’ve been shown of his character, I can’t believe that he'd go, especially since he wouldn’t believe that Laila would be there. I can believe he would react as he did, but for him to then inexplicably relinquish his anger seemed highly unlikely to me.
I liked that Laila thought that the girls wore too much make-up (she was probably right!) and I liked that she was unwilling to cede dominance to Amir, but this scene didn’t play well for me. It also betrayed Amir's sensibilities, too. If he feels it’s wrong for Laila to dance so lasciviously and so familiarly with others, then why doesn't he also feel it’s entirely inappropriate for him to be alone in the darkness with Laila, when he drags her outside? This seemed too contradictory and made little sense. It felt like Carleson was forcing her characters into behaviors which they wouldn’t naturally exhibit given what she's shared with us about them. It makes as little sense as it does later when Laila calls Amir to ask for money and he invites her to come over unescorted to his house full of men, not one of which is a relative of Laila's!
Her young brother Bastien is technically the king of his homeland since his father was murdered on orders from his religious zealot uncle, but he's a long way from that rôle now, and he doesn’t seem to care that much. Of the three of them, his mother Yasmin, his sister, and himself, he's the most at ease in his new home, but also the most spoiled. This is the next problem I had with this story. Bastien always seems to have what he wants: toys, comic books, a birthday party, but Laila's mother never has any money. Yet these are people are supposed to be crucial elements in some plan of the US government's, the very nation which spirited them out of their homeland and put them up in the USA. It makes no sense that these refugees, under the CIA's wing, would come home to find a rent overdue notice stuck on their door. It makes no sense that they're always completely penniless yet always seem have sufficient money to the day. It makes no sense that they're housed in some project instead of in some protected government location. It makes no sense that the newspapers would not be hounding them for their story. It makes no sense that they would be wandering around in public unescorted. Bastien could be assassinated, thereby removing any potential threat to the new leadership of his "kingdom". All of this let the novel down.
I found the section where Laila compares and contrasts her country (which goes unnamed) with the USA. This comes right after the section where she talks about meeting boys with two of her new girlfriends, and how segregated men and women are in her country, and then she goes right on to talk about PE being mixed, but the fact is that it’s not mixed in the US: not at her age. It’s highly segregated. The boys have their teams, the girls theirs, and they do not mix nor even play against each other. Sports in the USA is exactly like life in the more restrictive Muslim countries! The segregation of men and women is de rigeur in professional sport, but it begins long before that, in universities and colleges, and before that in high schools. What hypocrites we are! I wrote my novel Seasoning precisely out of disgust with this segregation.
The story is a bit confused and a bit confusing, but it’s worth reading for the PoV and for the twists and turns it takes, with both Laila and her mother vying for who does the best Niccolò Machiavelli impersonation. The ending is upbeat and intriguing, but the biggest prize-winner for me in this novel is Carleson's recognition that the USA isn't the only country in the world, nor is it the most important one for the overwhelming bulk of the world's population. This novel, though set in the USA, isn't at all about the USA. The author's note at the end, and the article about Benazir Bhutto after that, are both well worth reading, too. I rate this a worthy novel.
