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What Members Thought
This book is hard to describe because it teeters between realism and magical realism and fantasy. Regardless of its category, this book is about relationship and immigration and how we grow and evolve as people. Read it to see the world differently and with more compassion. Read it to give yourself the grace to change into who you might really be.
I just finished this book, and I want to devour it again and again.
This is a love story and an immigrant story, but mostly it is a story about endings and beginnings. The clever twist — and you know there’s a clever twist because this is a Mohsin Hamid novel — is to completely remove the middle from the typical migration tale.
In this novel, immigrants are whisked to other locations through magical doors. It’s a clever device that allows the reader to experience immigration without the actual j ...more
This is a love story and an immigrant story, but mostly it is a story about endings and beginnings. The clever twist — and you know there’s a clever twist because this is a Mohsin Hamid novel — is to completely remove the middle from the typical migration tale.
In this novel, immigrants are whisked to other locations through magical doors. It’s a clever device that allows the reader to experience immigration without the actual j ...more
I liked this more than I expected, and it started strong for me, but I felt like I was dragging myself through it by the end. The writing style was interesting at first but quickly got tiring - so many “ands” and commas instead of just writing a new sentence! There was a weird preoccupation with sex that didn’t seem to fit for me - it felt like he wanted to throw that in every chance he got, whether it furthered the story or not. However, I really enjoyed the interspersed little vignettes, and I
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I wanted to love this book, but I merely liked it. There were lines of prose that were beautiful or haunting enough to give me pause, but overall I couldn't get a handle on the characters. It almost felt like I was reading about them through gauze; I could picture them, sort of, but I couldn't fully grasp them. And the elements of magical realism were so minor that it left me wondering why the author used them at all.
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May 10, 2017
Mary
rated it
really liked it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
format-audio,
read-harder-2017
Read Harder - an immigration story. Beautiful and heartbreaking. Loved the writing - especially with Hamid narrating the audio.
The author annotated the first page for the PBS book club:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/moh... ...more
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/moh... ...more
Dec 10, 2018
Cat
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
fiction,
booker-prize-winners
spare, haunting, magical realism that was very real
