![]() ![]() An Arab-American novel as delicious as Like Water for Chocolate. Was that intentional? It's not my cup of tea. Buy a used copy of Crescent book by Diana Abu-Jaber. It's as if each is possessed by some external, driving spirit. None of the characters seem to have much sense of why they're acting as they do. It doesn't help that the character is written with absolutely no insight into her own actions or feelings. Why would Han fall in love with such a shallow woman? What does she have to recommend herself outside of her cooking skills and the blonde hair and pale skin that the author describes so admiringly? I lost most sympathy with Sirine about three-quarters of the way in. ![]() The Language of Baklava, her cooking memoir, won the Northwest Booksellers. ![]() For one, the narrator "voices" Sirine in such a blandly pleasant way that she begins to resemble, well, a dumb American. Her novels Birds Of Paradise, Crescent, and Arabian Jazz have won several awards. I couldn’t resist and, despite the Mills and Boon style cover, I had to read it. I found other things frustrating as well. Crescent, Portland author Diana Abu-Jaber’s second novel set within the Arab-American community in Los Angeles, has been compared to Like water for chocolate, the masterpiece of magic realism cum recipe novels. The food-as-love-and-life theme was pleasant (if a bit cliched: Working in a restaurant is not meditative, gentle work, and some passages border on food porn). ![]()
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