Lyrics Alley
12. Lyrics Alley - Leila Aboulela, 2010 (first-time reading)
This is a nice, reasonably entertaining book with a cast of reasonably appealing characters, but there's just nothing special about it. I was interested enough in the tribulations of the Abuzeids, but in a dispassionate and rather apathetic way - I wanted to see what happened, but I didn't really care about it. The setting is created in quite an evocative and interesting way, but the social and political conflicts of Sudan and Egypt in the 1950s are all but ignored. The writing is quite good but never strikingly so, and sometimes sounds quite stilted and awkward in a way that a good edit could have fixed, but clearly didn't. All in all it's a perfectly decent book, but it's not a great one.
This is a nice, reasonably entertaining book with a cast of reasonably appealing characters, but there's just nothing special about it. I was interested enough in the tribulations of the Abuzeids, but in a dispassionate and rather apathetic way - I wanted to see what happened, but I didn't really care about it. The setting is created in quite an evocative and interesting way, but the social and political conflicts of Sudan and Egypt in the 1950s are all but ignored. The writing is quite good but never strikingly so, and sometimes sounds quite stilted and awkward in a way that a good edit could have fixed, but clearly didn't. All in all it's a perfectly decent book, but it's not a great one.