Book Review: Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa

I was recommended this book by a good Palestinian friend of mine.

To Zeid: I am sorry. I have always treated your ethnicity as something novel about you, and nothing more. Until this book, I never appreciated the weight that you must carry as you move through an apathetic world. Not only an apathetic world, but a world that wants you to be apathetic, and wants you to ignore the very raw and open wounds in your history.

I think I will also have to separate my review of this book on its literary and narrative merits. Or maybe literary and emotional merits? I was continually humbled by the stories of the people in this book, and their ability to survive and love while surrounded by the disgusting, complicated, and horrific Israel-Palestine war (indeed after this book I hesitate to label it as anything other than a cultural genocide). I also acknowledge that while this book is fiction, it is rooted in the very real experiences of the Palestinian author. There is no way that a book that makes me a) consider my active participation in this apathy and b) empathize with the Sisyphean struggles of a huge number of people, should be anything less than an excellent book.

However, there is also no way that a fiction book as narratively challenged as this book should be anything more than a good book. This book was 300 pages of non-stop gore and cruelty (aka war), an exercise in the believable limits of Murphy’s law, and endless exposition. I frequently felt like the author was sacrificing a coherent and compelling story in order to make the reader feel as disgusted as possible.

As an eye-opening, educational, heart-wrenching, and historical book, this book is excellent. As a modern fiction book, it struggles.

^This was going to be the last line of my review, but I felt too cold writing it. I feel so weird reviewing something as undeniably personal to the author as this. I was tempted to put it down after 90 pages of non-stop cruelty but doing so felt like willful ignorance. This cruelty is happening, and I can’t pretend otherwise. I therefore want the last line of my review to be this:

Books like this are important because they bring light to something few people on this side of the world know anything about, they make you reconsider the role you play in a complicit world, and they make you more empathetic. If you can stomach cruelty, you should read this book. If you can’t stomach cruelty, you should still try to read this book.