stapsreads

The most recent book club choice - and goodness knows it's taken long enough to get round to actually getting a meeting together and talking about it (over Dark and Stormys, Espresso Martinis, and Mojitos, and all on a Tuesday night). The choice was announced in May. How, then, did I find myself having to order it off Amazon the preceding Thursday and read it in three days? Sheer incompetence, and other people taking the communal copies on holiday with them.

I wish I'd had longer, because it was very heavy-going in every sense of the word. Three hundred pages, counting the contextual notes at the end, very small print, and harrowing content. It was a frustrating book and, if I'm honest, stylistically a bit of a let-down. In the introduction Janice Boddy, one of Aman's co-authors, enthuses about the Somali tradition of poetry and story-telling, which wasn't borne out in the narrative itself. The style was very same-y all the way through, no matter what was going on. Opinions at book club were divided as to how effective this was - whether it highlighted the horrors of colonialism and misogyny even as it presented them as part of everyday life, or whether it blended everything into a vaguely depressing mush.

Like I said, I read it too quickly.

http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/10125792/