Several months ago, I won Refugee on a Pendulum by Jemil Metti in a Goodreads Giveaway. Because it was a Goodreads Giveaway win, I am leaving a review. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have bothered because this book left me feeling very confused.
The Plot As I Understand It
As I mentioned before, I was left very confused by this book, so I’ll provide a basic plot outline as I understand it. Sabah was going to medical school in Syria when war breaks out. Sabah’s dad magically has access to a medical school application for a school in the United States. Somehow, Sabah makes his way to the United States, goes to medical school, and graduates. After graduation, he goes back to the Middle East as part of Doctors Without Borders. There he meets Hamdia, a woman who he tries to help get immigrant status in the United States.
After a while, he moves back to the United States and works as a doctor there. Conflicts from his past start to catch up with him.
Why I Was Confused
This book was really hard to follow. It jumped ahead a lot. In several places, there would be this huge problem at the end of a chapter. Then when we got to the next chapter, that issue would resolved, but as the reader, we didn’t know how the issue was resolved. When this happened, I felt like the author had written one chapter, knew where he wanted to go with a future chapter, and decided to write that rather than finishing the part of the story where he was writing. Then he forgot to fill in the plotholes left when he skipped ahead.
There were also other places where the plot didn’t make sense. I’m not entirely sure what was happening or why specific characters reacted the way that they did. There’s one character who I thought was good. Then I thought he was bad. Then I thought maybe I was wrong about him being bad. After that, I thought he might be bad. In the end, I’m not sure if he was bad or good, but I don’t think that I was meant to be confused about whether he was good or bad.
This book also has a lot of grammar issues. The one that I found most commonly was missing quotation marks around dialogue. Often, there would be quotes at the beginning of what the person was saying, but the author never put the end quotes. There were a few times when I wondered why a particular character was saying something only to realize that we should have moved from dialogue to description.
On that note, the dialogue needs a lot of work. It’s very choppy and doesn’t sound at all like how anyone talks. It was seriously cringeworthy.
Reader Warnings
This book does have some swearing. The violence is either behind the scenes or not described in graphic detail. When it comes to sexual content, there is one character who was gang raped repeatedly by ISIS. This is not described in graphic detail, but it is referenced repeatedly throughout the book. That might be disturbing for some readers.
I hate to not finish a book, but I considered giving up on this one. I wouldn’t recommend it. It was just difficult to read, and not because of the subject matter. The story could have been interesting, but I think someone should have gone through the whole book, doing some serious editing.
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