What Strange Paradise - Omar El Akkad

 Title: What Strange Paradise (Bookshop.org)

Author: Omar El Akkad

Published: 2022 (first published 2021)

Genre: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary

Edition: Paperback

Source: Surrey Libraries

Thoughts:  I really wanted to like the book, as I thought, and the others in my library book club also thought, that it would be a good read.  And it was a good read; it's just that I couldn't get into it with the two different timelines that the author gave for the book.  The book really needs to be read either closely or multiple times to really understand the two main timelines.  It is definitely a fairly quick read, if you just want to go through it once, but I think that if you really want to understand the book, you may want to read it many times.

Bottom line: A really excellent read that needs to read multiple times to get a complete understanding of it.  I just feel like there was something more to the book that I missed that would have completed my understanding of the book better. Recommended.

Rating: 3.5/5

Description: From the widely acclaimed author of American War a new novel--beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic, and profoundly moving--that brings the global refugee crisis down to the level of a child's eyes.

More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another over-filled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives in their homelands. And only one has made the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who has the good fortune to fall into the hands not of the officials but of Vanna: a teenage girl, native to the island, who lives inside her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though she and the boy are complete strangers, though they don't speak a common language, she determines to do whatever it takes to save him.

In alternating chapters, we learn the story of the boy's life and how he came to be on the boat; and we follow the girl and boy as they make their way toward a vision of safety. But as the novel unfurls, we begin to understand that this is not merely the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world, it is the story of our collective moment in this time: of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair--and of the way each of those things can blind us to reality, or guide us to a better one.

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Another update

I bet you are wondering why I am doing another update.  This time there is a very specific reason and that is that I have decided to become an affiliate for Bookshop.org.  A number of book sites that I frequent use Bookshop.org, as they raise money for local bookshops.  For those in Canada, you can't do this but hopefully at some point there will be Canadian independent bookstores available for you to support.

So what does this mean for you?  Other than supporting a local independent bookstore, nothing really.  But it does mean that I can receive a small commission on each purchase that you make on the site, in addition to supporting your local independent bookstore.  This is also to say that there will be now be links to books that you can go and purchase and I can get a little extra money, if you choose to do so.  Also you can purchase lots of other books through my store and I will get a small commission on those purchases as well.

If you are interested, I have posted a link on my sidebar, but you can click on the link below and save it to your links.  Hope you find lots of wonderful books to read.

Jayne's Books Bookshop

It's been awhile

 

When I came back to look at my blog a few days ago, I hadn't realized how long it had been since I had been here.  The last 3 years have been chaotic to say the least.  

Unless you had been living in a cave, Covid-19 was striking as I wrote my last post and my anxiety was really starting to spike to the point that I felt that I could do absolutely nothing and I lost a lot of weight super quickly; I couldn't eat a lot.  But my parents came to my rescue and I went to live with them for a few months during those first few months of the pandemic.  I had planned to go to Mexico for a birthday trip in May 2020, but that was put on hold until we could go down with no restrictions.  

But the thing that took up a lot of my time in the last three years is my diagnosis of breast cancer in September 2021.  I had been in a car accident in late July 2021 and a few days later, I had noticed a shooting pain in my left breast.  I had a phone appointment with my family doctor the next day and mentioned to her what was going on.  She had me come into the office for a breast exam and then referred me to the breast health clinic.  After a series of tests and exams, it was determined that I had breast cancer that was locally advanced, meaning that it hadn't spread beyond my left arm pit and left breast area.  Within a month of my diagnosis, I had started my chemotherapy treatments, which I went to once a week from October 8 until December 30, 2021 and then every three weeks until March 3, 2022.  I then had my mastectomy on April 4, in which it was found that the cancer had gone from the size of my palm to the size of my thumbnail.  Yes they got all of the cancer and then I was put onto tamoxifen and had my radiation treatments from about June 29, 2022 until August 8, 2022.  I only recently got discharged from the cancer unit.

And now I wait for my second surgery to complete my reconstruction (I started it when I did my mastectomy last April) and when the healing from that is done, I will be able to move on with my post cancer life.

As for my reading life, I have been reading lots.  In 2020, I read about 125 books and really enjoyed The Giver of Stars by JoJo Moyes and The Splendid and The Vile by Erik Larsen.  In 2021 I read 83 books and really enjoyed The Rose Code by Kate Quinn, The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams, and The Last Green Valley by Mark Sullivan.

2022 was a bit of a wonky year for reading.  I got about 50 books read and there were some months in which I only got one book read.  But surprisingly, there were a number of books that were standouts in 2022.  Some of the standouts were: Beach Read by Emily Henry, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, Hamnet and Judith by Maggie O'Farrell, God Spare the Girls by Kelsey Mckinney, Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller, Booth by Karen Joy Fowler, Greenwood by Michael Christie, and The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton.  I suppose some years its not about the quantity read but the quality of the book that you have read (the Hamnet and Judith book is the same one that was published just as Hamnet; don't know why the Canadian publishers added and Judith).

I also joined  The StoryGraph sometime last year and am really enjoying it over there (yes, I am still on Goodreads). You can find my StoryGraph account over here.  I am also quite active on Litsy as well and continue to post my book reviews over on Instagram.

Anyways, I am off to do some reading for my book club that is meeting on Saturday.  I really do loathe Order of the Phoenix and while it's not my least favourite book, it's my least favourite book in the Harry Potter series.

Happy Reading everyone!