This book is very powerful, thought-provoking, and educative in all the best ways. I empathized with Salama as much as I am able; I am humbled to recognize my own privilege and adjust myself accordingly.
★★★★☆
I only knew the very basic premise of this story going into it--a girl who was meant to be pharmacist ends up as a volunteer doctor at a hospital in Syria at the height of the violence caused by a tyrannical regime and subsequent rebellion. This description of the book is accurate, but it does not comprise most of the story. To me, this is a straightforward love story set against a brutal background. At first, I was put off by the introduction to romance; I wanted the story to just be about survival and resilience. However, Kenan really wormed his way into my heart, and I came to really root for Salama and Kenan and their love.
Apart from the romance, I just really enjoyed the plot of this. The struggle to secure a way out of Syria along with Salama and Kenan's desire to fight and protect the country was stressful but really well done. I also was a big fan of the Layla storyline/twist; it was heartrending in the best and worst ways since I didn't see it coming but I had grown to really appreciate Salama and Layla's friendship. It very much reminded me of Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea so maybe it's not the most original twist, but I still liked it. Side note on the plot: As morbid as this is going to sound, I almost would have liked for the characters to not survive and it be like Salama is telling her story from heaven, just because I've never seen that done in this kind of story and it would have been even more impactful. That being said, because I was rooting for the characters so much, I did feel a large sense of relief when they all had a happy ending.
I don't want to understate the power of this novel; I think it is beautiful and important and sheds light on a situation that many of us were aware of but knew nothing about. The book has a very serious goal and purpose and I think it achieves both effectively. The reason this ends up as a 4/5 stars instead of a full 5 for me, despite my earlier gushing, is because I just think the writing is "not for me". Most of the time it was good/okay and I really appreciated the story, but there was quite a bit of purple prose in here that drew me out of the story. The plot is already so grim that we really didn't need so much flourishing in the narrative, especially when most of it was just in Salama's internal monologue. It really came off at times as spoken word poetry which is just not what I'm looking for in a novel. This may have been exacerbated by the audiobook narrator's reading style, but in general I found the writing to be a bit cringey at times, particularly in the first half of the novel when I was still familiarizing myself with the story and characters.
Final verdict: This hauntingly beautiful story is only somewhat diminished by excessive writing flourish.
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