Celestial Bodies

I was hoping for something that was a little more engaging than this ended up being. It was mostly a contemporary sort of fiction. People just going about their lives. And while the setting and some experiences were unique to the author's country I just couldn't keep myself in the story.

I realized pretty quickly that this is not a book I could passively listen to as I worked or went about my day - I really had to focus on what was happening in the story or find myself at a total loss as to who these characters were and what was going on. (This is not a fault of the audio narrator, who was excellent; rather, the structure of the book is non-linear, and set up in vignettes that focus on individual characters, building the story of this extended Omani family over the whole of the book.)

I have never read anything set in Oman, and did enjoy hearing about this family against the background of the disintegrating-then-abolished slave trade in Oman, of family and expectations for their grown children (in that way it reminded me a bit of Good Girls Marry Doctors, though those expectations showed up differently for almost every person, male and female, in the story), and the women did appear to have some agency in choosing their partners, careers, children's names, etc., even if their families (and sometimes even their own selves) were not pleased about any of it.

From reading other reviews I see the print copy had a family tree at the beginning, which obviously the audio didn't have, but I did glance over the free page of this study guide whenever I needed help remembering the characters' relationships to each other and a short summary of what was going on, and found it helpful.

This book never came together for me. It follows several generations of a family in Oman, but does so nonsequentially. The chapters each take the point of view of a different family member throughout the saga, but they could be anywhere from early on to fairly late in the family's timeline. Because of this, I never really found myself connecting with any of the characters in any real meaningful way. Compounding this for me is that there's quite a bit of vitriol and animosity in this family, either towards each other, towards other neighbors/people, or towards themselves, and this made it hard to actually find someone to like in the bunch of kind of vaguely unlikeable people.

The writing style was great though, and I feel like the author really had a good story here, it just wasn't my thing.

A tapestry of love and family dynamics, set in Oman, across several generations. It's a great portrait of a changing Omani culture over the last 100 years. From slavetrade, to date farms, to praying to jinns, arranged marriages, to Western interest and development of the oil industry. Woven into this are family secrets, disappearing mothers, a bedouin lover, husbands with lives abroad, sisters with opposing pragmatic and romantic visions of love.

We follow multiple perspectives from multiple families, jumping back and forth in time. Listening to this on audio, made it hard to track who is who. Until i got a hold of the family tree from the print edition, and stared at it about once per chapter, I felt quite lost. It's absolutely also possible just to immerse oneself in the flow of stories, but I always feel more at ease if I can track my characters.

Well-told and an interesting window into a culture, but I'd always prefer focused stories to tapestries.

I couldn't have read this book if I hadn't read [b:The Five Wounds 53597769 The Five Wounds Kirstin Valdez Quade https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1612030905l/53597769.SY75.jpg 83925120] two months ago. Ignorant, cruel barbarians living empty worthless lives – I would've cast it aside before page fifty. But the impact of Five Wounds lingered in me. I kept thinking back to the compassion Valdez Quade showed toward her ignorant characters; remembering their contexts and inner conflicts, the nightmare systems that produced them and that keeps them stuck; and I decided to apply that compassion and keep reading.Unfortunately, this was no Five Wounds. There's nothing worthwhile about any of these brutes: sure, they too are the product of a shitty religiofascist culture, and they too have been raised with idiotic superstitions and moronic traditions – but Alharthi's depictions are stark. She shows their nastiness and violence. She shows what passes for their inner lives, and it's pathetic: shallow, self-absorbed, completely unaware of the humanity of anyone around them. Living in fear and anger, their only purpose to breed and perpetuate the cycles of hollowness.Since I never felt absorbed by the book, my mind often wandered: to the unspeakable evils of Middle Eastern religions; to the idiocies of our own (U.S.) culture. How are we any better? Are we? I think so, and I think it's because at least some people here act with kindness, and promote education, and actively see other people as human beings with rights.Anyhow, back to the book. I'm not glad to have read it, see no point to it other than a chronicle of the worst of humanity. Read Five Wounds instead.