I found the actual story being told through this book was a great one. It was filled with emotional moments, both highs and lows, but I did find it hard to keep up. Sentences seemed to run on and with each new paragraph it seemed to switch to a different place, past/present event, or a different person. It seemed like some paragraphs should/would have indicated a new chapter. It was a bit (quickly) back and forth throughout a given chapter. The story itself was compelling and heartbreaking. Being an adult and looking back on the life events that have changed you, or made you have the "what ifs" is sometimes a very hard thing to do. It is necessary to do this in order to grow and overcome current struggles. To have a best friend who understands you and is willing to go on that journey with you says a-lot. Disclosure - I read an ARC copy so some of these things I am pointing out could have been changed a bit in the final copy! ( )

If you enjoy dialogue you will hate this book. If you like long paragraphs of personal introspection you will love this book. The primary character is a married woman (seemingly happy) who is haunted by a relationship she has twenty years before with a older man. She travels to Spain with a friend to the "scene of the crime". to see if the man is still there or if not sort through her feelings about the past.. Was it love or rape? Did he care for her or was he just using her? Frankly, I would love to give her a shake and scream GET OVER IT! Much ado about nothing. ( )

The narrator of this book states, “in all of my years of writing I hadn’t once been able to produce an outline or a novel that was distinctly plot driven . . . . [with] events that administer exacting lessons to the characters, forcing them either to grow or become more calloused versions of who they already were.” Well, the author certainly “succeeded” in writing a book that has virtually no plot and no complex or dynamic characters.

Arezu, a 37-year-old Iranian-American, travels to Marbella, Spain, with her best friend Ellie, an Israeli-American queer woman. Arezu has inherited the apartment where she spent a summer when she was 17. She visits to confront the ghosts of that summer when Omar, a 40-year-old distantly related man, seduced her and kept her in an abusive relationship. Once ensconced in the apartment, the two women do nothing except eat, drink, clean the apartment, and go to the beach. The entire book is Arezu’s unrelenting examination of her trauma.

To say that the pace is glacial would be an understatement. I certainly would have abandoned the book had I not felt obligated to finish it in order to write a review since I’d received a galley from the publisher. Good-quality literary fiction is cerebral but it does not overanalyze everything repeatedly. Who sees swans and feels compelled to comment that “The swans, too, were a symbol of nationalism, a polite intimation of England’s timeless colonial agenda.” At least a dozen times Arezu looks in a mirror and each elicits a long description of what she sees or imagines she sees: “A vertiginous sensation took hold of me. There she was, that other future version of me – her features wounded and disfigured, her skin stretched, sagging, the light in her eyes spent, her mouth cracked open – staring back at me from the reflective surface of the mirror. I grew increasingly claustrophobic . . . I felt the walls leaning in.” This future self is repeatedly described with “her wounded eyes, gaunt cheeks, her brittle hair” and “bloodied and bloated face.”

The descriptions of scenery are over-wrought: “the thick papery bougainvillea that crawled across the city’s surfaces like mouths painted rouge, like kisses turned toward the vivid blue of the sky.” Light is described as “uncertain yellow” and “yolky, oxidized” and “bright, eager” and “brilliant, luminous, incandescent” and “silky golden” and “warm vinegary” and “mildewy yellow” and “shy mustard” and “mild yolky”! Why are two adjectives always necessary? The writer seems to latch on to words and then feels compelled to use them again and again. Susurrus is used three times. The phrase “I considered” appears 34 times!

Ellie’s presence serves little purpose. Her main task seems to be as a distraction. She certainly doesn’t say anything helpful. In fact, dialogue is limited. What dialogue is included is stiff and unnatural: “’This card signals conflict and change. The conflict you experienced is deep and continuous with an ongoing conflict that existed and still exists outside of you, a cultural conflict between East and West, earth and water, masculine and feminine, the psychic and the material – you were caught at their fault lines. . . . In order to resolve this conflict . . . you’ll have to draw on all of your psychic and emotional resources. The resolution may be subtle, the path toward its achievement equally so, composed of nearly imperceptible shifts in consciousness that ultimately will integrate all of the many differing opinions that you carry within you.’” No one speaks like this!

After this wooden conversation, Arezu continues that Ellie “added that true integration didn’t mean eliminating contradiction but rather aligning the inconsistencies inherent in my intellectual and physical life with the high ideals of the heavens, not the heaven we’ve constructed from our limited position on earth, from our religious perspectives, but a heaven beyond the paradise we’ve been taught to imagine, a space that is abundant, wide open, that allows opposing realities to exist side by side without judgment – a complex space where we are invited to let go of our constant need to know or understand everything, where we are no longer measured by our supposed purity.” Then Arezu starts to cry! This passage may well leave the reader in tears as s/he tries to decipher this inaccessible prose!

Arezu comes across as full of self-pity. She blames everyone and everything for her falling into the arms of an older predatory man: “I had been primed – through my culture, my family dynamics, my own unbending character – to fall prey to him.” She blames her negligent father, her own loneliness, and Omar’s background and experiences in Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war. She thinks that maybe “the house manipulated me into craving what had then seemed to be unparalleled bliss” and argues that “our affair was made possible by the beauty of the Andalusian landscape” and even “The city seduced us with the magic of familiarity, the anthem of belonging, the forgotten memories of our ancestors who had resisted and survived persecution through subterfuge.”

Her self-dramatizing grates and does not arouse sympathy when she makes statements like “I was in acute pain” and I’d “been subjected to a violence so severe and perseverant by the gears of history” and “all my life there had been a gun pointed at my back” and “My life required of me an almost inhumane level of cognitive flexibility” and “being exposed to so much grief in our youth had numbed us.” In her day-to day life, however, Arezu seems to be functioning well; she has a loving husband and a successful career, though she claims to live “in a state of skeptical inquiry, on guard, her ability to trust shattered by history, her sense of self ground to dust” with no “ability to compose my own identity” and with “parts of myself . . . amputated from memory” after having been “pushed . . . prematurely over the ravine into womanhood.” None of these consequences are really shown. At the risk of sounding insensitive, I wanted to scream, “Okay, move on. Stop wallowing. You’ve managed to achieve so much despite what happened to you. Fixating on what happened 20 years earlier only gives it more power.”

For me, this was just an exhausting read. The term novel is not appropriate for this book; it is an unrelenting examination of a trauma; after a while, it produces only a susurrus in which meaning is lost. The narrator’s reflections are repetitive and fruitless, inspiring no growth.

Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.

Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). ( )

Pen/Faulkner Award winner for Call Me Zebra, Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi has written another novel equally deserving of accolades. It is an all-consuming, exhausting narrative, following the thoughts of an Iranian-American woman as she returns, after twenty years, to Spain hoping for an exorcism of the confounding memories of a cruel love affair with a much older man. A parallel storyline describes the oppression and its consequences of one culture on another.

Savage Tongues, a better title than the earlier proposed Arezu (the main character's name), keens and seethes with angst as Arezu meets again the landscapes of her oppression/obsession. Beginning with a rape, the affair continued, shaped by Arezu's teenage passion, manipulated by her lover's use of that passion. Arezu's scars run deep; she visits and revisits her time in Marbella, engulfed by a complex of shame, anger, agitation, outrage, and fascination. She was seduced, and the allurement of that seduction is evident along with and in spite of the memories of her lover's brutal possessiveness and invidious objectification. (The comparison to Eastern and Western cultures is clear.)

Her scars do run deep, and her memories and thoughts take the reader, as well, deep into a maelstrom of emotions, circling and re-circling the events of those months so many years ago that have never been forgotten. Arezu has a woman friend along with her on this journey to the places in Marbella that have resonated through her life, and a loving and understanding husband in the States. Ultimately Arezu, and the reader, swirl higher and higher to escape (at last!) into an acceptance of human frailty and the contradictory facets of the human condition.

Thanks to Houghton Mifflin and Bookishfirst for an ARC of this book. This is an honest review. ( )

Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Savage Tongues by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a lovely relationship drama set in Spain about an Iranian-American teenager's relationship with an older man and what happens 20 years later when she returns to the apartment she stayed in. The teenager, Arezu, moves to Spain to live with her father, but instead, he leaves her in the care/guardianship of Omar, an adult man who her father trusts. Arezu ends up spending a lot of time with him, and their relationship develops from there. The prose is beautiful and easy to read. I'm sure this will be a nice summer novel for many readers.

Here is a quote from Chapter 1 when Arezu is speaking about Omar:

"“You,” he said to me weeks later, said to me habitually then,
his head tilted back, his throat exposed, “are my lover.” He would
draw me in and kiss me hungrily. I didn’t always like it, perhaps
wasn’t even comfortable, but I let him. Maybe I even egged him
on. I don’t know. I’ll never know. I was in acute pain, lonely in
ways I was too young to grasp, and there was no one around to
ask me to articulate my suffering, to help me fix it in language,
so I raged on like a wounded animal who knows not what to do
except soothe her pain with more pain, lust after the final blow
of death that will put an end to it all. I became hooked on Omar.
He was like a drug, a humiliation I craved, and I kept going back
for more."

Overall, Savage Tongues reads like literary fiction that would also be a pleasant beach read for readers looking for a tale of romance set in Spain. For me, personally, I just couldn't get over the creepy age-gap in the relationship between Arezu and Omar, so that is why I took off 2 stars. This is also just not the type of book that I typically read. I don't usually enjoy literary fiction, realistic novels, historical fiction, relationship dramas, or romances. That's not the book's fault though. I'm just explaining why it wasn't a 5-star read for me. If you are intrigued by the excerpt above, or if you're a fan of beach reads set in a foreign country, I highly recommend that you check out this book when it comes out in August! ( )