Orange July is a thing they do over on LibraryThing, where you try and read one book that has either won or been on the long/short list for the Orange Prize or the Orange Prize for new writers. The Orange Prize is an award given to the best book published in English (in any country) by a woman in that year. Sometimes the Orange books are a bit of a miss for me (Impossible Saints might be one of my least favorite books ever. So ridiculous and bad), but other times they are absolutely fantastic (Bel Canto! Half of a Yellow Sun! Too many to count!), so I do try to participate in Orange July by reading at least one, often more, Orange books in July (and throughout the year as well, to be honest). I decided I would try and do a little review of the Orange books I read this July.

I read three Orange books this July - The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini, The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvhani, and Secret Son by Laila Lalami.



Title: The Boy Next Door
Author: Irene Sabatini
Pages: 403
First Sentence: Two days after I turned fourteen the son of our neighbor set his stepmother alight.



The Boy Next Door won the Orange Award for New Writers this year (2010), and in my opinion she really deserved it. I loved this book. The protagonist is Lindiwie (aside: I also really love that name!), a smart, kind of nerdy girl growing up just as the British colony of Rhodesia is becoming the independent nation of Zimbabwe. The son of the neighbor mentioned in the first sentence is Ian, and after he is (very quickly) released from prison Lindiwie's parents tell her not to have anything to do with him. Three guesses how that turns out. I loved Lindiwie, I loved Ian, and I loved their tension-fraught relationship with each other. In addition to the whole 'he was in jail for maybe burning a woman alive' thing, Lindiwie is a black African girl who is very smart and ought to have a fantastic future ahead of her, while Ian is white and has trouble finding any place for himself in the new Zimbabwe at all. Sabatini does a fantastic job exploring race issues (between Lindiwie and Ian, but also with others), personal issues, and political issues, and as a bonus is also great at not making me want to slam Ian's hand in a car door even when he does some really crappy and selfish things.

One of the things I have a soft spot for in books is a distinct and well-done voice, either in the narrator or in dialogue, and I thought Sabatini did a wonderful job with dialogue. She worked in slang/dialect without any kind of glossary, which made it a bit difficult at the start (especially for Ian - at times I thought that boy needed a translator!), but it was worth it once you got used to it. I also appreciated how Sabatini had this sort of elliptical structure going on without going overboard. I think that sounds a bit vague, so to clarify, at the end of the first section there are hints that a certain thing had happened (I am trying to be spoiler-free), but we don't know for sure until the book jumps forward several years, and even then you're not quite sure at first. I thought it was really interesting, the way Sabatini sort of highlighted-by-avoiding the big game-changing center of the book.

In conclusion: Awesome book, so why don't you listen to Sabatini talk about it a bit herself:







Title: The Blood of Flowers
Author: Anita Amirrezvhani
Pages: 368
First Sentence(s): First there wasn't and then there was. Before God, no one was.



The Blood of Flowers was long-listed for the Orange Prize in 2008, and I've had it in on my shelf for awhile now. In short, it is the story of a girl in seventeenth century Persia who, due to unfortunate circumstances, is forced to move in with a wealthy uncle in the city. This uncle creates Persian rugs for wealthy types, and as the girl (I am embarrassed that I can't remember the girl's name, but it was in the first person! She is usually just 'I'!) is fascinated by rug-making herself, she asks him to teach her. As time goes on she becomes quite accomplished, but her place in the household is by no means secure, and she is convinced to enter into a temporary marriage, meaning that she will be married for a certain number of months (I think three?) and if her husband is pleased with her he will renew it, but if he isn't he can just drop her. I was enjoying it up until she marries her husband, at which point it got kind of randomly porny. There were also some moments where I wanted to jump into the book all 'no, don't do that, can't you see how that's a TERRIBLE IDEA??' However, on the whole, I still thought that it was an interesting book, and the conflict between love/desire, friendship, and independence was compelling.





Title: Secret Son
Author: Laila Lalami
Pages: 291
First Sentence: The rain came unexpectedly, after nearly three years of drought.

Secret Son was long-listed for the Orange Prize this year, and I truly enjoyed reading it. In this one I think I'm going to have to talk about spoilers, so I will try and write the non-spoilery bit of my review here, and put the spoilery part under the LJ-cut. Youssef is a young man coming of age in a slum in Casablanca who feels out of place in general, but more specifically in the university he has managed to gain entrance to. He has always believed that his father died when he was just a baby, and is shocked to learn that his father is actually alive, and in fact a wealthy, powerful man. His attempt to reach out to his father (a man named Amrani) coincides with Amrani's frustration with his legitimate daughter, and as a result he embraces Youssef with open arms, drawing Youssef into his luxurious world. As the book began I thought it had a sort of Great Expectations vibe, poor boy plucked from poverty and drawn into a wealthy world where he desperately wants to, but perhaps cannot truly, belong - at the expense of the relationships he had in his 'old' life. I really liked the character of Youssef, and I thought Lalami did a wonderful job of finding common, universal ground between Youssef and the reader, even though I as the reader am coming from a very different place. One stylistic thing that I could see getting on some readers' nerves is Lalami's tendency to show us the same scene twice, down to the dialogue, but from a different character's point of view. I thought that the different take on the conversations was interesting, but it's not as if there is a great difference between what the new POV character actually thought and what the reader could guess he thought that needed clarification, so I could understand how some might find it redundant. Still, I thought the book was really quite good. Now - for the spoilery part!



When I saw the book compared to The Reluctant Fundamentalist on its jacket I was a bit wary because while I can't remember it all that well, my vague memory is that while the reader was meant to sympathize with the protagonist/narrator and gain insight into how he became a terrorist, in fact I thought he was self-absorbed, annoying, and weird to his girlfriend the whole way through. So the comparison was not a plus in my book. But, I thought, the name-dropping was probably there because The Reluctant Fundamentalist was really well-received, and publishers go through all kinds of contortions to compare a newly released book to a well-received one.

Actually, the comparison is an apt one, but I felt Secret Son did the 'guy you like winds up a terrorist' thing much better. To begin with, I actually liked and rooted for Youssef. As I said, Lalami did a good job creating a character whose (fairly universal) feeling of being out-of-place in life and more specifically in his university made you connect with him. Then, as he connects with his father and finds himself with a job, he follows his father's advice and neglects his schoolwork (a university degree, especially in literature, is practically useless) in favor of working, moves into a fancy apartment, and enjoys both his new lifestyle and a relationship with his father. Then his father's wife discovers Youssef's existence and unceremoniously has him fired from his job and evicted from the apartment. Youssef's father won't help him, and so Youssef must crawl back to his slum where he cannot find a job, needs to live with his mother again, and realizes that even if he repeated the last year at school, a college degree truly is useless in the job market. I thought that Lalami did a wonderful job describing the utter frustration and destructive lack of purpose that comes of being unable to find employment. As Lalami describes it, not only Youssef but basically everyone is in the same awful, unemployed boat. When Youssef finds a job listing for an entry-level job and calls the employer snaps that the position has been filled, and that he regrets ever placing the ad - the phone hasn't stopped ringing all day. This frustration combines with Youssef's feelings of rejection from his father and his father's entire world, and the belief that he is a burden on his hard-working mother. When an old friend of his who has now become employed by the Party, an extremist religious group, approaches him and introduces him to higher-ups in the Party who offer Youssef a way to make his mark and do something important while simultaneously revenging himself on his father, Youssef agrees.

I am going to say something really pretentious now, so I apologize. I thought that Secret Son was a really good title because Youssef is not just the secret son of Amrani - people like Youssef, impoverished, aimless and desperate young men who are seduced by extremism and violence and the promise of doing something that matters for once, are the unacknowledged sons of the entire system that Amrani played so well, of a society whose structure neglects its young people if they don't have connections. And of course that extremism ultimately betrays the young people it attracts in turn, making for a pretty desolate worldview.

The book made a real impression on me, although, scanning the reviews at LibraryThing, it has met with a pretty mediocre reception overall. Well, I have hated books that other people loved, and maybe now I love a book that other people find only so-so. I can only give my reactions.

And so that was my Orange July! I had a really good one this year, and still have a bunch of Orange books out from the library that I hope to read even though July is over. These books are mainly from the 2010 list - Small Wars by Sadie Jones, A Gate At the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, The Twisted Heart by Rebecca Gowers, and What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin (the last one was longlisted in 2000), and I hope they are just as enjoyable.