Etaf RumRezensionen

Etaf Rum’s latest work reminds us how easy it is to become stuck peering backward, imprisoned by unhealed trauma, pain and guilt. The author explores these complex issues via a touching albeit slow-paced story that examines family dysfunction over multiple generations. In the process, “Evil Eye” provides insights into Palestinian culture (talk about a timely issue.) The middle part of this novel was a bit of a slog for me. Some reviewers have mentioned vignettes that tend to be repetitive. My sense is that the familiar anecdotes were intentionally used to illustrate the protagonist's internal suffering. In the end, Rum delivers an impressive and thought-provoking tale that underscores valuable life lessons.

"A woman is no man" is a phrase that Deya's grandmother keeps emphasising. Though the Palestinian family has emigrated to the U.S. for years, they remain traditional and believe that a woman's place is in the house, and she should get married early. This is not what Deya wants but there is no one to advise her till her aunt suddenly appeared. Thus began a journey of doubt, self-discovery, and in the process, she found out the truth behind her parents' death. The death of her mother was left ambiguous. Etaf Rum seems to suggest that she was beaten to death by her husband for running away from home with the kids. If that is so, she is a brave woman. She wanted her kids to have a better life than her and she took action, although she did not succeed. In that, both Deya and her mum showed that women need not submit to men, and women can be like men.

It’s sad what goes on behind closed doors and the fears immigrants have about American culture and the Americanization of their children, especially so for girls and women. This is another story of male dominance, arranged marriages, and fear. Heartfelt story of a young women who had dreams of a romantic marriage and coming to America only to have it snuffed out. Her children eventually find a way out of this arranged marriage loop and find their own paths but it is painful. Interesting that I was reading this in October 2023.

Compelling story. All roads lead to heartbreak

Yara is growing more and more unhappy with her life. Her goal before she got married was to have more autonomy in her marriage than her mother did. She agreed to marry Fadi only if she could go to college and then get a job after they married. That kind of freedom is rare in her culture. She slowly realizes she is not as free as she thought she was. She went directly from her father’s control to her husband’s control. Sure, her husband is more permissive than her father was with her mother and her, but permissive is the keyword. She still has to ask him before she can do certain things. The breaking point comes when she wants to go abroad as a chaperone on a student trip and Fadi says she can’t. There is also an incident at her workplace and she has to go to counseling because of it.

Evil Eye was an authentic portrayal of depression and how it can cause both sadness and anger. It’s also about the struggle that women have to balance family and work life. In Yara’s case, she actually wanted to work more but her husband would only let her work during the hours that their kids were in school. She feels adrift.

I liked Evil Eye but I thought it got a little repetitive. That may have been the point though. Yara feels like her life is on autopilot, doing the same thing day after day. I feel like I got the point though and it could have been trimmed up a bit. That’s a small quibble though. I do recommend Evil Eye. I liked it enough that I recently bought Etaf Rum’s first book, A Woman is No Man and I can’t wait to read it.

I'm glad this book exists for people who need it. But it was a drudge of a book, not well-written except maybe to a very specific target audience. That does not impact my sympathy for anyone in any similar situation, of course.

This was far too relatable, which made reading it a bit painful and a bit boring at times. Like yikes that's a little close to home, and also been there done that can we move on. To be clear, I am not from a culture like Palestinian American women come from, I am not in an abusive relationship, but being lost in a fog of trauma-induced depression and anxiety in the midst of parenting and trying to exist outside of your role as wife and mother are things I have lived so recently. This beautifully weaves our main character's realization of the need for help and change with flashbacks to her childhood with her mother. The process of healing is unfurled delicately, and we end with a satisfying decision to remove the likelihood of passing on generational trauma. A lot of the plot is internal dialogue, which made this skimmable in places, but this is another amazing book from Rum overall.

Soooo different from anything that I've read. It made me extremely angry, sad, frustrated.

The topic of this book should be so unfamiliar to me, a white woman, but I just got it. Every woman in the world is trying to fight for her own life, but some of them just are not lucky enough to be able to do it openly.

This book made me want to learn more about everything that is outside my comfort-zone. Thank you Etaf.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CrqvlNCJq4j/

Etaf Rum - A Woman Is No Man: Definitely a first novel (the words repeat and repeat), but with a skilled, calculated ending. #cursorybookreviews #cursoryreviews½

A Woman is No Man. Etaf Rum. 2019. I have never read a book about Palestinians and their Islamic culture, and it was an eye opener for me. Isra is 17 when she is married to Adam and moves to Brooklyn and into the basement of her in-laws’ basement. Her miserable life consists of doing what her mother-in-law tells her to do which is basically cooking and cleaning. Fast forward 18 years: Isra and Adam are dead, and Deya their daughter is fighting for her freedom to go to college and not marry a stranger. A readable, interesting, sad book.

3.5 stars. This novel tells an important story, and I found the story engaging even though the pacing was slow and it felt repetitive at times. The author's storytelling felt more like YA to me, and I kept asking myself if it fit with the content. Overall, I enjoyed it.

This did a fabulous job of appreciating Palestinian culture, though I wish it had gone one step further in showing us why each woman felt it so important to preserve this culture and some more positively aspects, as it ultimately came across as a criticism and I think that's to the book's detriment. But Rum's writing is lovely and I ached for all the women in this book.

Gripping and disturbing. The author seems to speak from first hand experience of this immigrant community. I can't help but wonder how it was received by them.

CW: self harm, suicide, alcoholism, domestic violence

Well I feel a bit wrung out to be honest. When I read stories from ownvoice authors I feel like it is an absolute privilege to be allowed to spend some time in someone else's life and see the world through their experiences of it. I know parts of the story felt raw and harsh, but the love and desire to have their children be successful, safe and respected poured off the page to balance out the more intense parts.

While books that jump perspective can be distracting, here it only served to build tension. It is beautifully written (though the dialogue can be clunky) and left me fully engrossed in the story.½

A novel delving into bring Arab in a modern world and the suppression of Arab women in America and the generation that continues to tell women they cannot go to college, their duty to marry and produce
males and their inSuperiority to men.
This novel tries to show these women the courage to stand up for themselves.
“Culture cannot be escaped”, says Fareeda, “ even if it means tragedy. Even if it means death”.
My only negative reaction was how these points are hammered home so much perhaps at the expense of a good story. Also did nit like at all the abrupt ending.

Heartbreaking account based on the author's own experiences of a Palestinian woman forced into an arranged marriage. The marriage is loveless and the husband is abusive. Now, the daughter who is living with her grandparents is looking at the same fate - being married to someone arranged by her grandparents, vs. fulfilling her dreams of becoming educated. Until she meets a mysterious person, she doesn't know the full breadth of her family history. Once she does, she gains the courage to re-write her own story.
So sad, and so unbelievable that this continues to happen to this day.

Multi-generational family tragedy that follows three women from one Arab family – Fareeda, Isra, and Deya. It starts with Isra, living in Palestine in 1990. She marries Fareeda’s son and moves with him to New York. Next, we jump to Isra’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Deya, living with her grandparents in Brooklyn in 2008. Her mother has died but she does not know the details of her mother’s death. She dreams of going to college, though Fareeda wants her to get married. Isra is an obedient quiet woman doing what is expected. Deya wants to control her own destiny.

This book examines the expectations of women in a patriarchal culture. Rum is an Arab-American author who has drawn pieces of this story from her own experiences. It addresses the painful topic of spousal abuse. It is dark and sad, and not for the faint of heart. I found it difficult to read over and over about the mistreatment of women and their limited options, but it is ultimately aimed at raising awareness and offering hope through education, community support, and standing up to oppression.

I think I will give this a 3.5 star rating. It doesn't tell a well rounded story of the Palestinian-American immigrant experience but does every story have to? Probably not but it does make for a more compelling narrative when it does. I am sure there are families that only came to America to escape the war and violence so keeping their culture intact - good and bad - is a true experience. But I also believe that there are many families who came here to give their women the education and opportunities they would never have at home. I think people were annoyed, and some offended, that she only showed the one violent version but I didn't feel she was required to tell both stories. She could have told it in a less obvious way as she hammered the violence, abuse and misogyny over and over again throughout the book. But what struck me the most was how little the women held each other in any regard as well. It was as if they couldn't escape their violent lives so no other woman should either. I sadly think that this plays a part in a lot of situations, not just female oppression and not just in the Muslim culture. It runs a gamut of women not being believed in rape crimes, that protecting a man from a rare "false report" is the more important issue to legislate versus the millions of rapes that go unreported and unprosecuted because "she wanted it" to people voting against policies that would improve their lives because it sticks it to the "other." Also, the other side of the spectrum - would the ERA have been doomed without the help of Phyllis Schlafly and her ilk who claimed equality would "hurt" women by women to whom the rules would never apply? This is not to imply victim blaming at all but I think we need to examine how much we internalize discriminatory idea and behaviors that we need to hold up for self-examination and maybe that is why these issues all continue to linger. It's the "I'm not racist because I have black friends but I support voter suppression laws to give elections "integrity" mentality" that really needs to be flushed out and scrutinized. These are the things that kept going through my mind while reading this book and, maybe the author did not intend that I think about any of that, but I found it to be one of the more important subtleties within a novel that really had no subtlety.

The ending was not what I was expecting, but I couldn't give this book and these women less than 5 stars.

Deya, a young Arab woman living in Brooklyn with her grandparents and sisters, is meeting suitors chosen for her by her grandmother. She is just 18 and not ready for marriage. Deya's story reminds her grandparents of two other women in the family...Isra, Deya's mother, and Sarah, her aunt. Both women, despite being raised in very different worlds, wanted the same thing...freedom.

On her journey to discover who she is, Deya learns her mother's story of arranged marriage and the tragedy of how her parents really died. Upon learning this information, Deya embraces a factor she never considered in her life...choice.

I do not know what took me so long to read this book. I was immediately drawn into the story and cared about what happened to Isra, Sarah, and Deya. I loved the back and forth from one character to another while their stories opened up and they began to deal with their separate issues. This was a well-written story that showed lives that those who are not Arab may not be aware of...the need of the older generation to follow cultural norms while the new generation fights for their freedom.

I overextended my hold placing at the library and all came in at once; this one was due back before I had even started it and someone else was waiting for it so it was non-renewable. I admit that I read the introduction and the first chapter, then skimmed through and got the feel for what was happening. It is a very sad book and I focused on Isra's part of the story. The ending rather slayed me. It was written in a very clever way, so you knew what was going to happen but it wasn't told in a direct route. It caught my attention enough to contact friends in my book chat to tell them about it at 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday.

I find it very funny that a book with that particular name - 'A Woman Is No Man' - repeats this exact thought on every freaking page. Is it supposed to make the story convincing?
Women are not free. But men are free because they are not women. But women are not free.

Okay, we get it. We know that. Stop telling it. SHOW.

I honestly couldn't get enough of this book once I got into it. There were multiple instances where I had to put the book down and take a deep breath because some scenes completely shocked and amazed me. It was an absolute page turner. I had to know what was going to happen next and I had to figure out how everything was related. I should mention a *trigger warning* because there was a lot of scenes with abuse of varying kinds that were honestly pretty upsetting. But I think the author handled it well, especially given the context of the book in general. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a emotional book with twists and turns that also gives light to a new perspective.

audiobook fiction - told through the shifting viewpoints of three generations of Muslim American women, Fareeda (toxic mother-in-law and Palestinian emigrant), Isra (young mother who has also left her family in Palestine after marrying Fareeda's eldest son), and Deya (Isra's eldest of 4 daughters, raised by Fareeda after her parents' deaths, now of marriageable age but wanting to go to college instead). 1970s-80s Palestine and refugee camps / 1990s-2000s Brooklyn NYC.

Liked the story (for once I did not get tired of the switching storylines -- each was engaging and suspenseful), and the hopeful ending (especially in light of the author's backstory, though the book is not based on her own life), but I really hope no one makes generalizations about Islam based on these characters. There is oppression in some cultures that affects many women, but the Islamic experience is as diverse as the billions of Muslims who live in different places all over the world, and it would be a gross mistake to assume that to be a Muslim woman is as necessarily as horrible and tragic as these characters' lives might lead one to believe.

Please read also :

The Bad Muslim Discount

Books by Uzma Jalaluddin

I would also recommend the young adult fiction books by S. K. Ali½