The Almond Tree, Michelle Cohen Corasanti

ForumWorld Reading Circle

Melde dich bei LibraryThing an, um Nachrichten zu schreiben.

The Almond Tree, Michelle Cohen Corasanti

Dieses Thema ruht momentan. Die letzte Nachricht liegt mehr als 90 Tage zurück. Du kannst es wieder aufgreifen, indem du eine neue Antwort schreibst.

1mirrani
Aug. 24, 2013, 10:27 pm

This is an amazing story about a family living through the struggles between Israel and Palestine. It's one that honestly needs to be told and shared so that more can understand what is going on over there. It's touching and serious all at once. I couldn't put it down.

Right at the beginning, a family experiences death, which opens you to the heartbreak the people are going through. Yet the father of the family continues to encourage peace with his children. At one point he offers a doughnut to his son, who won't take it because it comes from a Jewish family.
Once again he offered it to me, saying, "One cannot live on anger, my son."
This is really when you realize that it's not going to be a story of hardship alone, but of overcoming what has happened and following your heart through it.

Later on the same character says:
Don't allow guilt to enter your heart, because it's a disease, like cancer, that'll eat away at you until there's nothing left."
And lower on the page, the son (who is the one telling the story) notes:
Courage, I realised, was not the absence of fear: it was the absence of selfishness; putting someone else's interest before one's own.
And I did spell that the way it was spelled in the book, btw.

Good things make choosing difficult. Bad things leave no choice.
Another of the father's lines, retold by the son.

"You cannot go back and make a new start, but you can start now and make a new ending."
That's the boy's teacher saying that this time.

It looks like that's the only kind of note that I am going to make in this book, until you get to location 3614 of the kindle copy and I highlighted What could I say? I owed my parents this. and said that I was getting tired of that phrase. I think that was the only thing that really bothered me, that "what could I say" in the writing style. It popped up several times. There was also a point about 91% through where one brother is fighting the other. In one moment he says he's an american, but two pages later he contradicts himself and says "We're as Palestinian as you are." That defeated the purpose of the argument for me... which I don't really want to go in to here, because that's part of the story.

Aside from every single thing in the world being the one brother's fault, I really enjoyed reading and I thought the ending was a wonderful way to bring everything to a full circle.