A Fail With A Middle-Eastern Flair
Mosaic is one of those books that makes me wonder how in the world it got published. It was book about serious topics, such as parental rights, life for Arabs and people of Arab descent in the U.S. after 9-11, along with the plight of Arab women. All are good topics and all definitely need to be discussed, but instead of a good discussion, we get clichés, caricatures instead of characters, and a preachy prose style. It was painful to read and I gave up on page seventy-five.
The plot was very “Not Without My Daughter.” Dina Ahmed is a successful florist in New York City. Though, she spends a lot of time on her career, she is also a loving mother to three children and a wife to her husband, Karim. Life was perfect for Dina, until her husband takes her two youngest children and flees to Jordan, leaving Dina with only an explanatory note. Dina spends the rest of the novel trying to find a way to bring her children home, while I was trying to find a satisfactory reason as to why it all happened in the first place. It makes no real sense. The Ahmeds have a good life, and have a supposedly good family life, so why would the husband pull this? The author tried to paint it as Karim had felt threatened living in the U.S. after 9-11, and public opinion was growing hostile to the Arabic community in the States; as well as Karim feeling like a failed father, after his oldest son reveals he is gay. It would have been a good explanation, but the author fails to show; instead, she tells. We are never given any real instance as to why the father would feel this way, and it just doesn’t make sense. We see no actual discrimination, no actual threat, and the oldest son is still a great kid and it all really contradicts the situation and it all feels incredibly pointless.
One of the biggest faults with the book is the lack of showing. There is plenty of telling, telling and more telling, which gets old really fast. You don’t feel the worry, fear or anger that the mother has or the honest determination to get her children back. That is supposed to be one of the worst feelings that a mother can feel, the loss of her children and the worry that they are alright, but you don’t feel it. It’s more like going through the motions, without anything to truly color it in and make it real. It really made me not care about Dina’s situation. This book was so incredibly wooden, from the emotion, to the dialogue, to the themes that were discussed. If all these topics are injustices, it doesn’t seem that they really matter. As long as you’re rich, beautiful and living amongst the higher class, all is right with the world. It made the story a complete waste of time and paper.
The characters in this book were just as hollow as the prose. Dina herself was mostly a poster girl for the empowered ethnic woman, rather than a woman with faults, strengths and a main character worth turning the pages for. She was Superwoman, able to do every last single thing she set her mind to. She was beautiful, and though in her forties, she had shown no sign of age and was still a “perfect size six.” Which, with both Dina and her friends, if I had to hear that they were a “perfect size six” one more time, I was going to scream. Dina was progressive and believed in “the American way.” Dina could do no wrong. It’s not a good read if your main character is that perfect, but it makes it downright unbearable when ALL your female characters are like that. Dina’s closest friends are just the same, except that one is pretty much a Oprah Winfrey clone and the other is the Super Jewish doctor, who wants to be precise and do every thing right. I love a diverse cast, filled with people from different backgrounds, but Dina and her friends were a little too “We Are the World” for my taste. The only change of pace is the female relative of Karim, Fatma, who was just mean, unpleasant, ugly and nothing more. Not to mention, it was irritating that the unpleasant female in the book was old-fashioned, right down to the Burka she wore. The men fared no better in the book. Karim was the stereotype of an old-fashioned Muslim man, and acting more of the cliché than genuine human feeling. Then, there was Jordy, the gay son who was that typical nice gay guy, that is supposed to make you feel bad for his situation but comes off as more “been there, done that.” I had thought that these characters were a good idea, but badly executed. I like reading about characters that feel like real people, instead of caricatures.
Another irritating factor of this book, was the unbelievability. Everyone (except Fatma) was really, really, ridiculously good-looking and constantly referred to having “movie star looks.” Everyone is rich and lives in plush apartments in the most desirable neighborhoods of New York City. They all have really good jobs and are the best at what they do. Who lives like that, really? Then another unbelievable factor was Dina and Karim’s families. Dina’s father is Lebanese who came to the U.S. and married a woman of Irish descent and they have a lovely home in NYC. Dina’s father also has ties to the U.S. State department and also helped avert a civil war in Lebanon, in the past. Karim’s family has ties to the royal family in Jordan. Even Dina recollects about how there were officials at her wedding. Looking at all of this, it was just too hard to believe. Having all of this at the characters’ hands just seems ridiculous and really impossible. I could have handled the characters being wealthy. I could have handled them living somewhere nice. But to have characters to have no problems (other than man problems, which all the females seem to have) and all these resources at their fingertips, it was just so unbelievable.
Then lastly, the preachy quality of the novel was grating to read. Even if I do agree with the author, I don’t like being preached at. The author does this via her character Dina. She makes Dina a progressive woman, who is accepting of all and really a smattering of qualities most people find to be good. When characters agree with Dina, they are portrayed in a good light. With characters that disagree with Dina, they are shown as primitive and stuck in their ways. This is especially shown with Fatma, being the way that she is. It’s a black and white world view and I hate that kind of perspective. Not everything is black and white, and I think that kind of thinking is wrong. I just find that, that author could have used the opportunity to discuss really important issues, but wastes it.
But then again, I only paid a quarter for this book. Maybe I’m only getting what I paid for.
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