A Word for Love: A Novel
Written by Emily Robbins
Narrated by Julia Whelan
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
A mesmerizing debut set in Syria on the cusp of the unrest, A Word for Love is the spare and exquisitely told story of a young American woman transformed by language, risk, war, and a startling new understanding of love.
It is said there are ninety-nine Arabic words for love. Bea, an American exchange student, has learned them all: in search of deep feeling, she travels to a Middle Eastern country known to hold the "The Astonishing Text," an ancient, original manuscript of a famous Arabic love story that is said to move its best readers to tears. But once in this foreign country, Bea finds that instead of intensely reading Arabic she is entwined in her host family's complicated lives--as they lock the doors, and whisper anxiously about impending revolution. And suddenly, instead of the ancient love story she sought, it is her daily witness of a contemporary Romeo and Juliet-like romance--between a housemaid and policeman of different cultural and political backgrounds--that astonishes her, changes her, and makes her weep. But as the country drifts toward explosive unrest, Bea wonders how many secrets she can keep, and how long she can fight for a romance that does not belong to her. Ultimately, in a striking twist, Bea's own story begins to mirror that of "The Astonishing Text" that drew her there in the first place--not in the role of one of the lovers, as she might once have imagined, but as the character who lives to tell the story long after the lovers have gone.
With melodic meditation on culture, language, and familial devotion. Robbins delivers a powerful novel that questions what it means to love from afar, to be an outsider within a love story, and to take someone else's passion and cradle it until it becomes your own.
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Reviews for A Word for Love
8 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bea, an American college student, goes to a country which is unnamed, but clearly meant to be Syria, to study Arabic. There, she says with a local family whose members include a man involved in resistance against the government and a maid who who, during the course of Bea's stay, begins a romance with a policeman.I have such mixed feelings about this one. It's got a lot going for it. The setting is interesting, and there's a fair amount of thematic stuff about language, which always appeals to me. And the writing is nice. Not flowery, and not full of vivid metaphor or imagery, really, but with a flow and a rhythm that's just really pretty. The thing is, though, that for much of the novel the very prettiness of the writing was oddly alienating to me, like a constant barrier of artificiality between me and the characters that kept me from being able to think of them as real people talking about real things, rather than as constructs being used by the author purely to say the right things at the right time to give the prose that nice flow.The novel is also basically an extended meditation on the subject of love, and I must confess, I do not have nearly enough romance in my soul for that to move me the way the author clearly intends. Indeed, my reaction to the lovers here, at least for quite a while, was what it often is with love stories of this kind: a desire to roll my eyes at them and tell them, "You're not in love. You barely know each other."So for quite a while, my main thought about the book was that while I appreciated some of what it was doing, and while I was certain it would be the perfect read for someone, someone more on the author's wavelength, it was just kind of leaving me cold.But then I realized, as I read on, that it was starting to work for me more and more. The characters were starting to feel more like real people, and I started to care about them. The romance began to seem interestingly nuanced and to feel less idealized and more human. It still wasn't exactly gripping me, but it was doing a lot more for me, and I started revising my opinion of it steadily upwards....and then it culminated in an event so contrived, so cliche, and so casually tossed-off that it all kind of fell apart for me in the last few pages. Sigh.