Evil Eye A Novel

4 stars - I liked this book! Yara (main character) is born to Palestinian parents in the US. As an adult, she slowly realizes what happened during her parent’s marriage and how much it affects her. Yara blames herself for it but takes the powerful decision to dissect everything. I went in with no expectations and quickly realized that the topics at hand are important: intergenerational trauma, migration and what goes on around it, Palestine and its rich culture, but also not so great topics such as domestic violence and gaslighting. These topics were brought to the forefront in a great way and how this trickles down if not taken care of. Giving the audiobook a 3.75 bcs Yara’s diary entries were sometimes hard to follow, but the book is definitely a 4-star read!

“It was like her body was an ocean, and these feelings would always come and go like the tides. The task was not to let herself be pulled away by one of the currents. The task was to accept that her insides would feel violent and tumultuous at times, and to be okay with that.” Beautiful writing, so many of the moments made my heart hurt. A great book about mental health and the struggles it can cause within different cultures.

🦇 Evil Eye Book Review 🦇

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

❓ #QOTD Do you have any superstitions? ❓

🦇 Raised in a conservative and emotionally volatile Palestinian family in Brooklyn, Yara thought she would finally feel free when she married a charming entrepreneur who took her to the suburbs. With her family balanced with her professional ambitions, Yara knows that her life is infinitely more rewarding than her own mother’s. So why doesn’t it feel like enough? Her mother blames a family curse for the trouble she’s facing, and while Yara doesn’t really believe in old superstitions, she still finds herself growing increasingly uneasy with her mother’s warning and the possibility of falling victim to the same mistakes.

💜 I could spend a year writing this review and it would not convey everything I need to say, nor the vast depth of emotion I felt while reading it. Instead, I'll start by saying thank you. Thank you, Etaf Rum, for a story that captures the complexity of being a Palestinian-American woman and daughter of immigrants. Thank you for illustrating the trauma that can leak from one generation from the next -- trauma we're seeing and feeling in real-time, as Palestinian families continue getting displaced from their homes. Thank you for crafting a woman like Yara, who, despite trying so hard to defy the expectations and limitations set on her, still struggles, because that is the reality of this life. A woman who, despite pain and invisible scars, took a step forward, embarking on a journey of self-exploration and change. Those words, "self-exploration and change," seem so simple. Maybe, to some people, they are. But to women of a certain background, certain upbringing, they seem impossible. From experience, I know what writing these perceptions (both through my own journal entries and through characters) can feel like. It's no easy feat, and takes quite a bit of self-exploration into yourself, the writer. So again, and a thousand times over, thank you. I've seen more of myself, my background, my history, than I could ever express in a review.

💜 Yara says, "I want to be a voice for Palestinians...I want to make people feel seen." Rum writes, "Her whole life, she'd believed reliability would never been granted to someone like her...women like her who were searching for themselves in the art around them, women whose experienced needed to be legitimized." That's what you've done. That's what this story, what Rum and Yara's story, has accomplished.

💙 I do wish we'd seen more positives to the Palestinian-American experience, if not through Yara's life, than through other Palestinians around her. But her isolation was a source of her depression, so I understand why we didn't see how other women like her were living their lives. I also wish we saw more consequences for her husband's actions. Then again, how often are men ever really held accountable?

🦇 Recommended to all readers, namely anyone to learn more about the Palestinian-American experience. Please remember, this is only one perspective, one version, one life. Millions have experienced the same root history; a catalyst that's echoed outward, uniting us through a shared experience. But as Yara said, olive trees grow back twice as large after they're burned to ash.

✨ The Vibes ✨
🧿 Palestinian-American FMC/Author
🪬 Journal Entries
🧿 Feminism
🪬 Literary Fiction
🧿 Mental Health (Depression/Anxiety)/Therapy
🪬 Motherhood
🧿 Trauma/Abuse

💬 Quotes
❝ But she also had dreams of making meaningful work, leaving her mark on the world. She felt certain, in the depths of her being, that something beautiful wanted to be created through her. ❞
❝ Why didn’t the world recognize that identity and privilege were accidents of birth? How much more empathy would people have if they understood that their position in life was decided not by goodness or merit or fault or need but by luck and chance, a toss of a coin? ❞
❝ It was because all her life she’d learned to feel safer in obedience than to be free. ❞
❝ Language was often a bridge, but sometimes a barrier. No matter how she chose her words, they would likely come out a bit distorted, inadequate...Silence was better than being misunderstood, erased, unseen for who you really were. ❞
❝ Her soul had always been cracked in the center, her body split in two, her feet stretched so wide between opposite sides of the globe that she couldn’t stand straight. ❞

Another deep cut from Etaf Rum. I can’t wait to read whatever she does next.

             I know I read Etaf Rum’s first novel, A Woman is No Man, because Goodreads says I did it’s in my book log from 2020, but I have little memory of that book.  In my defense, I’ve read around 1000 books since then, and it’s pretty impossible to recall every book I’ve finished (or not finished, some of them ended up on my DNF list). Unfortunately, I didn’t leave a review for that one, so I don’t even have a written record of how I felt about it.  This book made it onto my list because it was a Book of the Month Club selection (I read all the books, even if I don’t order physical copies of them), and I honestly didn’t even remember the author’s name until I started the book and was reminded that she also had also been previously published. 

            I had few expectations of this book when I started, and the majority of this one just made me mad.  I highlighted NUMEROUS passages that showed the amount of gaslighting and abuse this woman went through, and I was fully prepared to hate everything about this story.  Culture aside, an abused woman is an abused woman, and at first it seemed like this book was going to justify the abuse because that’s how things were done in Palestinian-American families.  As I read, I recalled flashes of Rum’s previous novel, so along the way I felt confident the woman in THIS book wasn’t going to just sit there and allow the mistreatment to continue, and I was immensely relieved. 

            Yara, mother of two little girls, found her life to be stifling and stagnant.  She found a small amount of joy in the single college class she was able to teach, but eventually even that was taken from her.  Struggling with her own identity and happiness, she continued to be told by others (men) that she has everything a woman needs and definitely more than she should want.  She’s got a home, she’s got kids, and that is what a woman should want out of life.  Yara and her husband barely talk and never talk about anything of value.  Yara’s father calls her ungrateful and selfish because she wants to find joy and worth outside of the home as well as in…and it almost felt like she was being told that she had no right to joy, and certainly no right to be valued as a person outside of being a wife and a mother. 

            Eventually, Yara manages to extract herself from the loveless marriage.  I cheered.  Yara was able to discover that what she was experiencing in her home wasn’t normal and shouldn’t be happening, so she left.  I applauded Rum’s use of mental healthcare in this book, as it continues to be scorned by many people, but especially those in Yara’s culture.  It made me think of my own brother, who years ago was insistent that depression and anxiety were decisions, and all you had to do was just change your mind…and POOF, it would go away.  I personally went through years of therapy and was well aware that was not true, but it took my brother many years before he would also find mental health assistance useful.  I don’t think I’ll ever understand the stigma, especially when a young mother seeks out help, but at least now we’re talking about it.

            I know nothing about Etaf Rum except what is written in the blurb at the end of the book.  She is also a Palestinian-American divorced mother, so I feel like this book might be more autobiographical than fiction.  Or not.  However, it felt like this book came from some deeply personal experiences, which made the book just a little bit better than others.  I appreciated Rum’s focus on personal satisfaction and mental healthcare, and I loved that Yara got out.  This is a great book.    

A beautiful & heartbreaking, yet hopeful novel about a Palestinian-American woman, Yara, working through generational trauma. I’ve never read a book that handled mental health as well as this one. Etaf Rum shows how these feelings of grief, frustration, guilt, loneliness and sadness can bubble over and hurt those around us, that healing is messy and confusing, but ultimately that there is hope.

There are so many layers & things about this book that make it good and one of my favorite elements was the use of food/art and showing how they can be used to foster connections, share cultures and express emotions. I really loved Yara & Silas’ relationship and I think more books should have such sweet & supportive friendships in them.

I will definitely be picking up more of Etaf Rum’s books.

I wish I had better known what this was about and where it would go, so maybe I would've known that I'm not healthy enough for it right now.

Yara ends up in unwanted counseling to keep her job after she blows up over racist comment by a coworker. What unfolds is a story of generational trauma, family pain, and marital stress. It was hard to read, but ultimately hopeful.