Reading this felt like watching a movie! 🎥

Thank you Netgalley for the opportunity to read this as an ARC.

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This is the story of Hoda a Christian teenager from Ain El- Remmaneh in Lebanon and the story begins with her life as a 15 year old who grows up during a civil war. She has a love interest, Sami whom she dreams of marrying. Unfortunately for Hoda, her marriage is arranged with Tony (Mr Khoury) who is twice her age.

What I loved about the book:

- the writing is descriptive, and there’s a lot of dialogue which I personally love as I feel engrossed with the characters (this is important for me in a story where it is character- driven!);

- knowing what Hoda went through as a young girl, reminded me of past experiences I and some of my friends went through as teenagers, when we had our first encounters with boys or how we’d act giddy around our crushes, it was beautiful to see Hoda develop as a woman throughout and this resonated with me; and

- I learnt a lot about that communities in Lebanon with it being quite diverse (Christians, Muslims and so on)

My main criticism would be that I would have personally preferred if the book were written in 1st person for me to be able to “feel” more of the characters’ emotions.

Veil of silence by Danielle Abi-Saab is a compelling read that took me out of my comfort zone and confronted me to realities and characters far from who I am and who I know.

The beginning of the story is set in the mid 80's, during Lebanon's Civil War, where Hoda is a young fifteen year old girl aspiring to lead a life beyond the ravages of the conflict. Between tradition, religion and family guidance, she finds herself engaged to a man more than twice her age. Her unfolding story is one of deep resilience, self-discovery, survival and broken hope.

The reading of Hoda's story wasn't easy, as it came with difficult and sensitive topics, such as domestic violence, verbal and sexual abuse and psychological trauma. Despite this, I found myself reaching for this book to turn page after page, wishing to escape the ever so real feeling of emprisonment and powerlessness Hoda was experiencing. As a female reader, I could not help but root for her, even if we could not be more different. What I thought would be a somewhat contradictory and two-dimensional character turned out to be an honest depiction of a young girl who had much to learn from life's hardest battles. My emotional response to the different characters surrounding Hoda were strong, and I was fully invested in the turnout of this story.

While Abi-Saab's prose tends to lean into the "telling" instead of "showing" at times, her simple but compelling storytelling carried this deep and monumental story successfully and presented us with a main character far from those we meet in other books in the genre, whose arc will not soon be forgotten by this reader.