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Finally finished The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shanai Boinanjiu - which is her debut novel. Shanai according to the author bio is an Israeli, was born in 1987 in a small town on the Israel/Lebanon border, and she served in the Israeli Defense Forces for two years.
The book itself is hard to review. But haunting. And amongst the best I've read in the last few years. (Granted I've read a lot of crappy and forgettable books). It's about three Israeli women in their late teens who are drafted into the Israeli Defense Forces. The book is told both from the women's perspectives and those who either love them or are related to them. Both male and female perspectives are provided. But it is mainly about what it is like to be a young woman living in Israel during the early 21st Century.
Some books require work to read. They test your mind. Retrain it. Force you to think a little differently. Like learning a new language. While others are easier...you barely have to work at it, you can skim whole paragraphs and still know what's happening and often finish in a day, turning pages rapidly as if you are watching a tv show or movie and not reading or thinking at all, just gazing through a glass. This book is the former, not the later.
It is not a page-turner. It will not keep you up late at night reading. But you won't forget it five minutes later. It's not plot-driven, more character driven, and the characters are complicated and not always easy to like or identify with. They feel real. The story feels real as well. As if it is non-fiction not fiction. You feel as if you are there in the desert, looking at the olive trees. Not gazing safely through a glass at them.
It requires slow digestion and pulls you deep inside another person's perspective - with a stream of consciousness style that takes a while to get into the rhythm of, like learning a new language or a new composition of music. But it does require the right mood and frame of mind. It's also the type of book that works very well in Book clubs and English Lit courses - much to chew on.( Read more... )
Not a book I'll forget any time soon. In some respects more horrifying due to its basis in reality than any horror novel I've read. The characters seem to have lost their souls by the end of the novel, and are fighting with a listless sluggishness to get them back again. What an endless war does to us, what endless fighting for a cause we no longer understand, whose meaning seems to have ebbed ageas ago...and how constantly demonizing the enemy begins to chip away at us - is no better expressed than through these pages. It's a "Heart of Darkness" for the modern age.
Highly recommended, but not for the faint of heart or hard of mind.
The book itself is hard to review. But haunting. And amongst the best I've read in the last few years. (Granted I've read a lot of crappy and forgettable books). It's about three Israeli women in their late teens who are drafted into the Israeli Defense Forces. The book is told both from the women's perspectives and those who either love them or are related to them. Both male and female perspectives are provided. But it is mainly about what it is like to be a young woman living in Israel during the early 21st Century.
Some books require work to read. They test your mind. Retrain it. Force you to think a little differently. Like learning a new language. While others are easier...you barely have to work at it, you can skim whole paragraphs and still know what's happening and often finish in a day, turning pages rapidly as if you are watching a tv show or movie and not reading or thinking at all, just gazing through a glass. This book is the former, not the later.
It is not a page-turner. It will not keep you up late at night reading. But you won't forget it five minutes later. It's not plot-driven, more character driven, and the characters are complicated and not always easy to like or identify with. They feel real. The story feels real as well. As if it is non-fiction not fiction. You feel as if you are there in the desert, looking at the olive trees. Not gazing safely through a glass at them.
It requires slow digestion and pulls you deep inside another person's perspective - with a stream of consciousness style that takes a while to get into the rhythm of, like learning a new language or a new composition of music. But it does require the right mood and frame of mind. It's also the type of book that works very well in Book clubs and English Lit courses - much to chew on.( Read more... )
Not a book I'll forget any time soon. In some respects more horrifying due to its basis in reality than any horror novel I've read. The characters seem to have lost their souls by the end of the novel, and are fighting with a listless sluggishness to get them back again. What an endless war does to us, what endless fighting for a cause we no longer understand, whose meaning seems to have ebbed ageas ago...and how constantly demonizing the enemy begins to chip away at us - is no better expressed than through these pages. It's a "Heart of Darkness" for the modern age.
Highly recommended, but not for the faint of heart or hard of mind.