Author: Chris Katsaropoulos
Publisher: Waterside Productions
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. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!
This is an odd little story, only some ninety pages and written in a quite large and double-spaced font, so it’s more like 45 pages. The front cover describes it as "a novel" but it's actually closer to a novelette.
The story features two main characters: Amel, a young Palestinian girl who lives in the beleaguered Gaza strip, and Ra'anan Cohen, a fighter-bomber pilot who lives in Israel and who is filled with disgust with - and hatred for - the Arabs.
Amel's only dream is getting out of her tiny wreck of a village where's she's perennially hidden under a burqa, and is a victim of the lustful gazes of men wherever she goes. She wants to be her own "master" and free to live a better life.
Ra'anan dreams of the cease-fire being over so he can get back to bombing terrorists. Finally it is, but as he slows his speed and levels off his jet for his smart bomb run, targeting a tunnel system which Amel's brother is secretively helping to build, something changes dramatically.
It's not what I was considering might happen: that Amel and Ra'anan would somehow end up together wondering at how they could have been such 'enemies'. It’s more of a rationalization - some might argue a spiritual awakening - that brings about a change in Ra'anan's thinking.
I wasn't a huge fan of the ending. It seemed too much to arise from what little had come before, but it’s really not that significantly different from the kind of ending I wrote for an entirely different short story I published in Poem y Granite, so it would be hypocritical of me to down-grade it for that! Hah! Hoist by my own petard!/p>
Seriously, what impressed me in this story wasn't the ending, but the writing. It was really well done, very evocative, with really excellent world-building from so few words. The writing takes you right to the location, and has you walking by the side of the characters, hearing what they heard, seeing what they saw, feeling what they felt. It was all of that which made me consider this to be a worthy read.
