Review: Ambitious
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 17, 2014
I wanted to love this book, the premise is interesting. It's a love story set against the backdrop of Lebanon in the 80s, where both partners have their own traumas to work through and have to avoid or overcome social situations. There's a lot of potential there.My first issue with the book was small: Jasmine sends Adam a text message wishing him a happy birthday. This was in 1987. This took me right out of the story, because I had to flip back to check to see there hadn't been a time skip to much later, and then I had to go Google when text messaging became available. Cell phones were wildly expensive in the late eighties and early nineties, but both Adam and Jasmine work at the embassy so it's plausible they might have them for work purposes. (Though it's much more likely they'd both have pagers.) However, text messaging via SMS wasn't available until 1993. This would be a minor detail, but it was very distracting. A lot of Adam and Jasmine's relationship is conducted via email. That's more plausible: PCs were available but very expensive.The second real issue I had with the book was a lot bigger. SPOILERS after this sentence. Jasmine drops out of the story, having been forced into a face-saving marriage. A few years later she shows up in Adam's life again and they resume their relationship. However, something has changed and suddenly she's really anti-Semetic. But we don't find that out right away, instead they live together for a while and suddenly it just comes out. I'm not saying that this is implausible, people change a lot, but we have no perspective on why Jasmine changed like this or her thought process in coming to live with a man she thoroughly despised.The eroticism in the story is well done and beautiful. The relationship between Adam and Jasmine is plausible in its suddenness and passion. They're both wounded people  who have every reason to not fall in love. The setting is carefully chosen and very interesting. In general the book's worth a read, it's an ambitious story.