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The Map of Salt and Stars - Joukhadar
3 stars

This is the kind of book that I usually like very much. I know this book was not poorly written, but I wasn’t at all enthused with it. That is at least partly due to my own mood. I wasn’t in the mood for a story that was full of darkness and grief. I’ve given it 3 stars because I didn’t think it was a bad book. I was frustrated that it wasn’t a better book. I know that many people were deeply touched by this story, so take my criticism with the proverbial grain of salt.

From the beginning, I wanted something that the author never intended to provide. I wanted the mother’s perspective. I was outraged that she would take her children out of the relatively safe American environment to return to Syria just as it was about to implode. I realized that my judgmental bias came from ignorance. But, I wanted to know why! That wasn’t the author’s purpose. He is telling the story from a child’s perspective. Nour is a very perceptive child, unusually perceptive given her synesthesia, but the adults around her leave her deliberately ignorant. In my experience, children need the facts, in language that they can understand. Their anxiety increases when they don’t know things. As a reader, this approach left me frustrated with the unexplained gaps in the story. And then, there’s the synesthesia. It’s an unusual characteristic, but it’s gaining in popularity as a literary device. It gives the author an opportunity to create poetic similes; something that Joukhadar did beautifully, but too frequently. It felt contrived.

The historical/mythological story of Rawiya did not hold my interest at all. I was annoyed when it interrupted the more compelling contemporary story. Again, it felt overly contrived. The author worked too hard to create parallel storylines. It was also a mash-up of history, mythology and the author’s creation of Rawiya as hero. I might have enjoyed it as a stand alone adventure story. But, it didn’t work for me in this context. I kept wishing that Joukhadar had enlarged the contemporary story with the perspectives of the other characters; the mother, the other sisters, and especially the heroic, Abu Sayeed.

JGrace, I can fully understand your frustration with the mother, I too wanted more from that character. Although I rated the book high I had to read it in small doses. A book I should have finished in less than a week took me nearly 2. A large part was the subject matter, the other was the anxiety the child was feeling was pouring into me.

Yes ... I never understood why the mother chose to return to Syria, unless it was for some promise of safety / security for her family that she felt should could not attain on her own in New York.

Book Concierge wrote: "Yes ... I never understood why the mother chose to return to Syria, unless it was for some promise of safety / security for her family that she felt should could not attain on her own in New York."

I could think of a lot of reasons why she might have done this. Reasons that were obviously compelling to her. I just wanted to know what they were from her perspective.