BOOK REVIEW | A Pure Heart — Meonicorn

RATING: 4.5/5
AUTHOR: Rajia Hassib
ISBN: 052556005X
ISBN13: 9780525560050
PUBLISHER: Viking
RELEASE DATE: August 6th, 2019
PAGES, 288
EDITION LANGUAGE: English
SETTINGS: USA, Egypt (Cairo)

This is the first book I read in 2021, and how lucky I was to love the first book of the year. Rose and Gameela are two sisters who grew up in Cairo, Egypt. Rose is an Egyptologist who married an American husband and immigrated to the US, where Gameela stayed in Cairo pursuing her career and living with their parents. Two sisters drifted apart and have had a draught relationship since then. Shortly after The Arab Spring movement, Gameela died from a suicide bombing, left her artifacts and many mysteries for Rose to find out.

The book presents a complicated emotional dynamic to readers. Even though the protagonists are the two sisters, the story unfolds around three characters, each of them has a different respective to the same thing they are experiencing. Confusion, misunderstanding, anger, and sadness are mixed in with the initial grieving they have. Have settings in two different countries and cultures adds to that.

To me, this book, although short, has a rich background of Egyptian culture and recent history. Because it sets mostly after the Arab Spring, there’re a lot of narrations about people’s believes, power groups, and Egyptian people’s reactions and reflections to the movement. To people who know Arab spring well or keeps up with middle eastern events, the book may be slightly touched the movement on the surfaces. But to me, who has little to no idea about Arab spring and middle eastern countries, this book was an entrance to the political and cultural events.

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But I have to say, to read this book smoothly, you need to at least have some brief ideas about the different sides of Arab spring, or you will be lost like when I first read the book. But it’s not very hard to pick up the sense by only reading this book either. So it was not a big deal to me, although I did wish I knew more to begin with. This also makes me ashamed of myself because of how little I know about the world. And shows me how neglectful I am for certain world events.

One little chapter particularly caught my eyes in this book. It’s when people in Cairo reacted to a piece of news report written by an American journalist. It precisely described how people, although suffer from their day-to-day life due to the current political activities, still wants the public especially from outside their country to see them as a wholesome and harmonious nation. As a Chinese, I see things like this occurs in China a lot and I used to think it’s a more conservative culture thing in China, where you don’t show people the negative things about your home and hometown. But seeing this phenomenon in a book about Egyptian culture makes me think maybe it’s a universal thing.

Another thing that connects me in this book is the immigration aspect of this book. Both Rose’s own story and the immigrants we see from her eyes. The nostalgia of the hometown, the different identities one needs to adapt to in both countries, the expectation of the future, all mixed in this Rose’s interaction with people. And I liked how it also shows people who lived in their native countries can be confused by trying to understand. As a person who lives thousands of miles away from my hometown, I relate deeply to this paragraph:

It must be hard for anyone to imagine to choose to leave a place you love so much, but I think people who moved away usually thinking more about the destination, than they do about the place they leave behind, it is like chasing a dream, you just don’t look back until much later. at least that’s how it was with me.

On to the things I didn’t enjoy that much about the book. One of the three characters’ story was weaker compares to the other two. It added the depth of the story, but because it started too late in the book, it’s hard for readers to connect or even recognize that it’s part of the main storyline.

Also, I have read some critics of the book, saying it has cliche characters and relationships because most of the “two sisters” type of books have one sister who is more rebellious, another is more conventional. They would all have a rough relationship, and some problem to solve in between. But I think readers' experiences of this aspect largely depend on how many of these books you have read. To me, who just came back to reading after a year’s hiatus, it’s not something I can say, except it's not a cliche to me yet and I liked it.

But one thing that made me think a lot is, am I looking at the stories from an overseas reader's perspective? If the book was set in China, will I still think the characters are genuine? Like the phenomenon presented in the book, if the book was set in my hometown and about my culture, will I still think the portrait of the Muslim family was authentic, or the grieving and the suffering are relatable? Or will I think it’s another book that’s written for the overseas market? It’s a question that’s very hard to answer.

I recommend this book to readers who like a little bit of sad tone in their book, some mysteries, and the readers who want to read about Egyptian culture, especially about the impact of Arab spring, how it shaped people’s life.