3.5/5

This book is borderline insufferably self-congratulatory. It's also rather sweet at times and rides that fine line of acceptable diversity that I as a white person still, frustratingly, deem the norm on a subconscious level. So, did I like it? Yes; quite a bit in a number of places, but for such a sizable text, it could have obsessed far less over plot machinations and probed more than it did the postcolonialism era that is Britain After Empire. Then again, no work tackles such and cultivates such a feel good demeanor with this number and overall average of ratings on a site such as this, so I'm probably barking up the wrong tree. Still, this is a work that would go down far more smoothly for me as a film than as a book, so, while this wasn't an absolute favorite, I wouldn't mind a well crafted visual piece, especially the sort that glories in the aesthetics of landscape the the main character has a healthy appreciation for. All in all, a heartwarming type that pays enough lip service to the 21st century to get by and was an easy enough read to make up for its halfhearted stabs at national self-awareness and the broader scheme of things.

Much of the reading I've been doing in the last month of 2019 has been rather nonchalant to the point of self-indulgence, and it was with expectations of this continuing that I picked this up. I found myself not too enamored with the main character's foibles at the beginning, but I suppose that was part of the point, as tragedy and conflict (albeit on not too devastating a scale) and, most importantly, unexpected sources of happiness lead him to question, perhaps not everything that he's ever valued in his entire existence, but enough to ever so slightly stop being such an ethnocentric git (although he could well afford to branch out his reading tastes in Arabic writing a tad). It wasn't exactly a predictable plot, but it was rather unnecessarily busy, and it would, as I said previously, have benefited much from a more contemplative frame of view that more fully engaged with cultural differences without a background of corporate machinations overshadowing everything. I also would have preferred that the villain not be so predictable

Spoiler

(a witch? really? not to mention the whole knight in shining armor/mirroring of earlier white ancestor's prowess)

, but the overall work was both credible and heartwarming enough to rise sufficiently above the tropes it utilized, if not enough to propel it into stardom. So, I will be on the casual lookout for the film of this. Otherwise, I recommend this to those with an inclination to stiff upper lip Anglo types of romance and are fine with mere touches on brutal themes that the narrative doesn't follow through on.

I'm still not having much luck with turning my brain off and simply enjoying some of the more casual books on my shelves, but I've been having enough with other forms of media that I don't mind so much. The world still persists in the same old same old in terms of media representation, and this work, published within the last ten years, is an uneasy truce between the horrors of history and the systems of bigoted ostracization today. It also tries to be a sort of toned down romcom at points, and at parts, it didn't seem like it knew what it truly was all about. It pulled itself together by the end, but it had easy themes to do it with, so it would have had to really screw things up to fail in that regard. That can summarize the whole book, actually: easy goal, easy achievement, and no real room for bounds and soars. Ah well. If social machinations, understated compassion, and a sprinkle of diversity is your thing, you'll probably have fun with this. Or you could just wait for the movie like I'm doing.