Dima

This play follows Nora, a married woman whose seemingly loving husband, Torvald, thinks is not very careful with money.  When a secret that Nora has been keeping for years threatens to come out, she tries to hide it from Torvald and resolve the problem on her own. Unfortunately, her efforts do not succeed, and her life begins to unravel and she is faced with the reality of what her husband's priorities are.
I was not expecting a powerful play when I started listening to this. My first thoughts were that Nora seemed to be sneaking behind her husband and was in fact squandering money. But it became quickly clear that that was only Torvald's narrow and ignorant perception of her. My heart was broken for her when she decided to stay away from her children believing she was poisoning their lives with her secret. And I felt betrayed when Christine went back on her plan of helping her. However, as it helped reveal Torvald's true person which led Nora to leave him, I could find it in me to forgive her.

In a world with four parallel Londons, magicians who have the ability to travel between them are extremely rare. One of those is Kell who is from Red London, and besides being a messenger between the King of Red London and the monarchs of Grey and White London, he also tends to smuggle artifacts between them, which is extremely illegal.  It's all well until it isn't, and events have him setting for Black London, which has been ravaged by magic and blocked from the rest, with an unlikely companion.
I enjoyed this book a lot! This is my first V. E. Schwab book, and I loved her writing style. I regret going for the audiobook because it made it take much longer than I would have preferred, so moving forward, I will finish the series with e-books - luckily they are all currently on Kindle Unlimited. I loved the characters in this book. Kell is struggling to feel like a part of his “family”, Lila is quite a badass that I want to see more of, Rhy's love for Kell was very apparent, the Dane twins made my skin crawl, and as much as I disliked Holland during the book, he did not deserve the ending he got.

In a world where your inheritance limits your prospects in marriage, the Bennets have five daughters to worry about. This makes the arrival of the very eligible Mr. Bingley to their county an opportunity to secure the marriage of one of their daughters. And no one is disappointed that he seems to only have eyes for Jane, their eldest. However, in his company, Mr. Darcy arrives, who seems to be a very unpleasantly proud man, and his acquaintance with Elizabeth, the second daughter, is off to a bumpy start.
My first exposure to this story was when an abridged version of it was the assigned reading for my 9th-grade English class. Since then, I have watched multiple adaptations and retellings of the story, but I didn't come around to reading the original novel until this year. And boy was I missing out!  The novel manages to convey how much Mr. Darcy liked Lizzy very early on in the story. This has always been a point that bothered me before because the focus of all the adaptations seems to be on his comment of there not being any women handsome enough to tempt him to dance, but not his actual reaction and opinion about Lizzy.
I have often struggled with the title of the book, I knew that it was meant to convey Mr. Darcy's pride and Lizzy's prejudice, but I couldn't manage to see how it's prejudice when he was proud and thought that the people of Hertfordshire beneath him. However, the novel shows his aversion to social gatherings in general, making it obvious that his pride was indeed being prejudged.  The most entertaining thing to me was how my own opinion of Mary has changed. Even though I still would never perform any sort of music publicly, I agree with her that staying home and reading is better than any social function.

This is a two-part short novel. The first part is an account of a true story that happened in Al-Naqab desert in southern occupied Palestine in 1949, where a young Bedouin girl was gang-raped and killed by Israeli soldiers. The second part is fictional based in modern-day Palestine, when the 1949 story was revealed, and a Palestinian woman feels compelled to investigate it further.

This book is not a light read by any means.  I was fascinated by the narration style in the first half of the story, being told from the perspective of the head of an Israeli army unit stationed in Al-Naqab in 1949.  Following that, the shift to the perspective of a young Palestinian woman living in Ramallah, who seems to have some kind of obsessive tendencies, was unexpected, but not jarring. The description of the road she was traveling to get from Ramallah to Yafa was so well done that, as someone who has traveled that road tens or maybe even hundreds of times, I could visualize it as I was listening to the book.

I started reading the book without reading the synopsis, so I didn't know what the story was about. During the first half, for a split second, I was wondering if I had misinterpreted the intentions of the soldier, and whether he actually wanted to keep the Bedouin girl safe from his unit. The pain and horror I felt when the rape started happening was overwhelming.I loved the parallels drawn between the two timelines, particularly with the appearance of the dog, and the smell of kerosene. The ending was as perfect as it was heartbreaking. There are few things that can be conveyed with minimal words, and this was one of them.

It's such a “minor detail” in a well-narrated book, but I wished the narrator was better instructed on how to pronounce Arabic names.

No longer interested in supporting problematic authors.