This is a crazy way to start a blog post but I promise you it’s relevant: I’m an Indian Hindu and I have many relatives and friends who live abroad. Some of them migrated there and their children are American and Australian citizens. What I’ve observed is, the more the people who first lived in India move away from the country, the more they need to observe religious traditions. This is probably because they need to compensate for the physical distance by emotionally, mentally, and spiritually being close to their roots. So when I saw that one of my favourite Booktubers was publishing Dust Settles North by Deena ElGenaidi, the story of two Egyptian-Americans trying to find a connection to their roots and religion, I knew I had to request it.
Thank you to the publisher, Boundless Press, Bindery Books, Jananie K Velu, and to Netgalley for the early copy and apologies for the late review!
The Plot
Deena ElGenaidi’s debut novel Dust Settles North is about Hannah and Zain, two siblings who have unexpectedly lost their mother. The funeral is in Cairo, in the house of their maternal grandmother, and as they bury her and prepare to go back to the US, they have to come to terms with their grief and how they want their life to look like. So Hannah decides to stay back in Egypt, trying to settle into a new normal, finding like-minded people but also looking for a more solid connection to Egypt. Zain, back in the US, goes through a phase that seems to destroy everything he knows along with himself.
To make matters worse, Hannah and Zain discover their father’s betrayal and know that they cannot forgive him for what he did. But Zain has a conundrum: How is he any different from his father? And while Zain wallows in the self-inflicted darkness that seems to be overtaking his life, Hannah finds herself in the midst of the Arab Spring Uprising.
Now how will Hannah and Zain reconcile everything that they learn as adults with everything that they’ve been taught? Will their beliefs tear them apart? Or will they grow and find a new middle ground, both with each other, and with their father? And how will everything that they learn about politics and religion impact how they move forward in life?
Dust Settles North is a fantastic combination of so many powerful things. It is a story of different types of loss, grief, and anger, of finding one’s way back to their roots, of finding one’s way back to life, of reconciliation, of getting better acquainted with your siblings as an adult, of learning more about one’s heritage, religion, and family while in thick of a revolution (2012, Arab Spring), and learning about oneself and doing what needs to be done in order to become better. It is well-written, the language flows along with the emotions it looks to convey, and it is quite educational when it comes to actual incidents and opinions from Egyptian political history.
On the other hand, the two main characters, Hannah and Zain are wondering about whether or not they are “real” Egyptians or “real” Muslims. And though it might be easy for us readers to have opinions on it, reading this book gives you an idea of what it is like to question what you’ve been taught your entire life and to reconcile what you see with it. Two things can be true at once and it is up to you whether you want to accept it or not. Hannah and Zain are constantly vacillating between these two things, struggling to accept them.
In this process of the struggle, however, the writing and the plot gets repetitive, going over some of the same things over and over again. More than emphasizing on the importance of these points, it becomes something that grates at your mind. Not to mention that Hannah and Zain keep those vacillations till the second to last chapter. So it gets a little tiring to read the same thing over and over without any resolution to it or without any progress in the thinking or experiences of these two characters. To be honest, there is progress in the overall story. Just not in the characters’ thinking. So when they arrive at the end, it just feels abrupt. I wish there had been a more gradual and authentic journey for them, is all.
But I’ll still recommend this book because of all the positives. I’ll just also give you a heads up and tell you to keep the negatives in mind as you go into it.
Have you read Dust Settles North? If yes, what did you think of it? If no, would you pick this book up after reading my review? Let me know in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you!
I’ll see you in the next blog post.
Until next time, keep reading and add melodrama to your life! 🙂
The Melodramatic Bookworm 