Review : Girls of Riyadh

Title :Girls of Riyadh
Published: July 5, 2007
Author: Rajāʼ ʻAbd Allāh Ṣāniʻ
Original language: English
Format :ebook

Description
A bold new voice from Saudi Arabia spins a fascinating Scheherazade-like tale of four young women attempting to navigate the narrow straits between love, desire, fulfillment, and Islamic tradition-for the first time, the hidden world of today's upper-class Saudi women is revealed by an insider.

Review:
Each chapter begins with the narrator writing about her project and the reactions she is getting, before she then settles down and offers yet another episode from the lives of the four friends.
The four main characters aren't completely typical Saudi women:

The girls belong to society's "velvet class," an elite whose behavior is normally kept hidden to all but themselves.
Their families are wealthy, the girls are generally very well educated (training to be doctors and dentists, for example) and most have at least some experience abroad, in some cases even traveling unaccompanied to England and the United States. Both at university and abroad they are in closer proximity to the opposite sex than is otherwise generally possible or permissible, but finding love and romance proves almost impossibly difficult in a world where the future bride and groom are often only permitted to see each other a single time before their wedding.
The girls' romantic woes are quite fascinating, but much of this is also frustrating. The men remain ciphers, and most of their actions go more or less unexplained. That is, of course, how it also appears to the girls -- but that also leads one to wonder why they have anything to do with these men in the first place.
The difficulty of getting to know anyone of the opposite sex, given all the restrictions in place, seems nearly overwhelming, but even where connexions are established, Alsanea doesn't manage to make the men convincing characters. (Such simple idealised description, dominated by passion, is of course a staple of romance novels everywhere, but given the foreign conditions here the failure to make the male characters three-dimensional is far more noticeable.)

Summary
Hmm.. controversial with a capital C. Now speaking as a Saudi girl that lives in Riyadh I would say that this book captures a lot of issues teenage girls are faced with such as: dating, drinking, sex etc. I think it shows Saudi Arabia in a different light.

Quotes :
“Verily, Allah does not change a people’s condition until they change what is in themselves.”


“Apparently, all men were the same. It was like God had given them different faces just so that women would be able to tell them apart"

“When love has been in your life you see that the only true, real pleasure of life is love. Every other thrill arises from that basic source of pleasure. The most meaningful songs are those your lover hums in your presence, the prettiest blossoms are the ones he offers and the only praise that counts is your beloved's. In a word or two, life only goes Technicolor in the very moment love's fingers caress it.”

My rating : 3 of 5

Review ini diikutkan dalam challenge :
#reading book in English 2013
#finding New Author 2013