[Review] The Almond Tree
21/12: Won this book as a give-away today on GR. Can't wait to receive and read it!
26/2: Finished the book, will review it later.
28/2: Time to review this book.
This book covers a very important topic: the conflict between Israel and Palestine. This is a topic that many of us can't even begin to understand completely, but all I know is that the situation is terrible for both sides.
For a heavy topic like this, a book can be a perfect way to raise awareness and show a human side to a conflict that we know mostly from what we see on the news. I guess this raised my expectations quite a bit. I realise this is a debut novel and as such I shouldn't be expecting too much. Let me begin by saying, as a debut novel it overall wasn't such a bad book.
In this review I will judge the book as just that: a book / story. And I must say I was left a bit disappointed. For example, the book starts of with multiple terrible deaths in the first few chapters. Unfortunately the writing was too bland to get any emotion from me about the events described. This went on for most of the book, although it got a bit better near the end.
The book covers the life of one person over nearly sixty years. That in itself was interesting. A side effect was that many emotional topics did not get touched upon as much as they maybe should. It felt the author was attempting to make the story more emotional but failed. Overall, I think the story told had many interesting and important aspects to it. But due to the lack of emotion, I couldn't help but roll my eyes at some events: "Seriously?" or "Not again!" Another minus is that some parts of the story were too unbelievable for me. Like winning the Nobel Prize at the end of the book after being nominated ten years in a row. This seemed to discredit a lot of the story.
I can imagine other people would enjoy this book more than I did. Looking at the other reviews I see many people were very touched by the book, and I do understand and believe this. Apparently it just wasn't for me.