Book Updates! Holla!
I've read a lot of books lately but I've been a bum about updating. Actually, I've been job searching and Wii Fitting. It's cool though. Here are my book updates. Hopefully I'll have more up this week.
Title: Not Easily Washed Away: Memoirs of a Muslims Daughter by Brian Arthur Levene
Rating: 2/5
Pages: 272
Genre: Memoirs
Summary (off Goodreads): Not Easily Washed Away is the true story of a young girl who was born to a Muslim family in Pakistan. She suffered through sexual, mental and physical abuse for fifteen years, which was perpetrated by her father Abdulla. Laila decides to take advantage of her father’s incestuous addiction by having him acquire a visa for her to the United States, where she feels as if she can rid herself of a putrid past. The book is written from a psychological perspective in first person, as Laila shares her painful past with the reader, sparing no details of her ordeal as a child, teenager and young adult.
I was actually hoping that this turned into a fantastic book. I hoped that this was really going to show a moving story of a girl who had a hard life and everything she went through and the challenges that she overcame. Unfortunately, I really didn't get any of that out of it. While the things that happened in this story were certainly tragic, Levene's writing just wasn't capable of transferring it to his readers.
Laila is a Muslim girl raised, for most of her life, in Pakistan. She lives with her father's family, who hates and despises her. They believe that her father did her mother a favor by marrying her, despite the fact that her mother is educated and came from a fairly well educated family, while her father's family was not. They looked down on Laila and her mother and sister because they had to support them while her father was in Mecca and they essentially treated Laila and her mother and sister as slaves in their home. Her mother fell into depression because of it, all but neglecting her daughters. She saw herself as a failure, and was viewed as a failure, because she did not produce boys.
This was not even the worst of Laila's life. Around the time that she was ten years old, her father started sexually molesting her. It started with kissing her and showing her pornography and progressed in to blowjobs and oral sex for his daughter and, eventually, full intercourse. It was something that tortured his daughter her whole life. Even when she was finally able to escape him, it still haunted her. These were horrible things done to a young girl. All her life she questioned what she had done wrong, which is often what rape victims do, especially ones so young who are molested by relatives. It wasn't the topic of this book that bothered me.
What bothered me was how Levene presented it. The whole book read like a text book. It felt like I was reading a how too book on how to be sexually molested. I didn't connect with the character in any way. One of the biggest issues was that he never allowed me to interpret how Laila felt. It seemed every step of the way I got a laundry list of her feelings, leaving this huge disconnect between me and the main character. I think if you're going to write a book with this delicate of a topic, you really need to make sure you reader feels something for your character. I felt more for her sister (who it is indicated was also molested though the suspicions are never confirmed) mainly because I'm never in her head. No one is ever sitting there telling me exactly how she feels.
When Laila finally gets to America (which she does by talking dirty to her father and thinking she's in control. Again, I should have felt horrible for her, knowing she wasn't in control at all but there was nothing.) she is in a terrible situation. His father got married to an American to stay in the country and the woman believes that Laila should be her slave. Laila works night and day, goes to school constantly and drinks herself into a stupor to deal with the pressure in her life. To deal with all of her secrets she remains drunk almost twenty four hours a day. When her younger sister comes to the states, it almost makes things worse. In some ways it does.
Probably the thing that bothers me the most is how Laila finally deals with her problems. She doesn't work them out by seeing a therapist. She basically gets a sugar daddy. Christan, who does seem to genuinely care about her, and frequently tells her he loves her, takes both her and her sister in. But he goes about it the wrong way. They run away with him. Eventually the end up in New York. Laila's sister moves out because Laila believes that she needs time alone with Christian and their new baby (another vice that really bothers me) and the advice that Christian always gives her is never really GOOD advice. She really needs to see someone and talk to someone who is not so emotionally invested in her but instead, they're really using each other to just forget about their problems. No real healing is going on and this book is trying to praise that. Ok, yes, it's great that she finally is free from her father's home and abuse. But what about her sister who has a lot of things that she's been hiding? The decision is to just let her go and deal with it herself instead of getting her some real help? And Laila deals with her problems by burying them. There is still so much that's wrong with Laila's life and now she's bringing new life into the world when she doesn't even have herself together.
Over all, my biggest criticism of Levene's book is that I was so disconnected from the characters. I should have been sobbing through this book with all the horrendous things that Laila went through but instead, I was neither here nor there about it. Yes, I feel bad these things happened but I was never really over wrought with emotion. I want to be connected to my main characters. I wouldn't really recommend this to anyone. It's kind of a bad portrayal of all sorts of everything.
You can read this review and all others at im_writing or my Goodreads account.
Books so far this year: 5
Currently Reading: The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson and The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown
Title: Not Easily Washed Away: Memoirs of a Muslims Daughter by Brian Arthur Levene
Rating: 2/5
Pages: 272
Genre: Memoirs
Summary (off Goodreads): Not Easily Washed Away is the true story of a young girl who was born to a Muslim family in Pakistan. She suffered through sexual, mental and physical abuse for fifteen years, which was perpetrated by her father Abdulla. Laila decides to take advantage of her father’s incestuous addiction by having him acquire a visa for her to the United States, where she feels as if she can rid herself of a putrid past. The book is written from a psychological perspective in first person, as Laila shares her painful past with the reader, sparing no details of her ordeal as a child, teenager and young adult.
I was actually hoping that this turned into a fantastic book. I hoped that this was really going to show a moving story of a girl who had a hard life and everything she went through and the challenges that she overcame. Unfortunately, I really didn't get any of that out of it. While the things that happened in this story were certainly tragic, Levene's writing just wasn't capable of transferring it to his readers.
Laila is a Muslim girl raised, for most of her life, in Pakistan. She lives with her father's family, who hates and despises her. They believe that her father did her mother a favor by marrying her, despite the fact that her mother is educated and came from a fairly well educated family, while her father's family was not. They looked down on Laila and her mother and sister because they had to support them while her father was in Mecca and they essentially treated Laila and her mother and sister as slaves in their home. Her mother fell into depression because of it, all but neglecting her daughters. She saw herself as a failure, and was viewed as a failure, because she did not produce boys.
This was not even the worst of Laila's life. Around the time that she was ten years old, her father started sexually molesting her. It started with kissing her and showing her pornography and progressed in to blowjobs and oral sex for his daughter and, eventually, full intercourse. It was something that tortured his daughter her whole life. Even when she was finally able to escape him, it still haunted her. These were horrible things done to a young girl. All her life she questioned what she had done wrong, which is often what rape victims do, especially ones so young who are molested by relatives. It wasn't the topic of this book that bothered me.
What bothered me was how Levene presented it. The whole book read like a text book. It felt like I was reading a how too book on how to be sexually molested. I didn't connect with the character in any way. One of the biggest issues was that he never allowed me to interpret how Laila felt. It seemed every step of the way I got a laundry list of her feelings, leaving this huge disconnect between me and the main character. I think if you're going to write a book with this delicate of a topic, you really need to make sure you reader feels something for your character. I felt more for her sister (who it is indicated was also molested though the suspicions are never confirmed) mainly because I'm never in her head. No one is ever sitting there telling me exactly how she feels.
When Laila finally gets to America (which she does by talking dirty to her father and thinking she's in control. Again, I should have felt horrible for her, knowing she wasn't in control at all but there was nothing.) she is in a terrible situation. His father got married to an American to stay in the country and the woman believes that Laila should be her slave. Laila works night and day, goes to school constantly and drinks herself into a stupor to deal with the pressure in her life. To deal with all of her secrets she remains drunk almost twenty four hours a day. When her younger sister comes to the states, it almost makes things worse. In some ways it does.
Probably the thing that bothers me the most is how Laila finally deals with her problems. She doesn't work them out by seeing a therapist. She basically gets a sugar daddy. Christan, who does seem to genuinely care about her, and frequently tells her he loves her, takes both her and her sister in. But he goes about it the wrong way. They run away with him. Eventually the end up in New York. Laila's sister moves out because Laila believes that she needs time alone with Christian and their new baby (another vice that really bothers me) and the advice that Christian always gives her is never really GOOD advice. She really needs to see someone and talk to someone who is not so emotionally invested in her but instead, they're really using each other to just forget about their problems. No real healing is going on and this book is trying to praise that. Ok, yes, it's great that she finally is free from her father's home and abuse. But what about her sister who has a lot of things that she's been hiding? The decision is to just let her go and deal with it herself instead of getting her some real help? And Laila deals with her problems by burying them. There is still so much that's wrong with Laila's life and now she's bringing new life into the world when she doesn't even have herself together.
Over all, my biggest criticism of Levene's book is that I was so disconnected from the characters. I should have been sobbing through this book with all the horrendous things that Laila went through but instead, I was neither here nor there about it. Yes, I feel bad these things happened but I was never really over wrought with emotion. I want to be connected to my main characters. I wouldn't really recommend this to anyone. It's kind of a bad portrayal of all sorts of everything.
You can read this review and all others at im_writing or my Goodreads account.
Books so far this year: 5
Currently Reading: The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson and The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown