PositiveThe Financial TimesAfter this thrilling intro, the focus shifts from the crisis of the accident to its context and the questions it provokes, and the narrative takes long diversions to meditate on domestic life, privilege, discrimination, international politics, poverty, family dynamics and the conflicting forces that make us who we are. Although the plot continues to move forward, barring a few static scenes, it feels secondary to the ideas Gundar-Goshen wants to explore ... At their best, the philosophical explorations of Waking Lions are thought-provoking. The treatment of otherness is particularly rich as events bring liberal Jew Eitan into close contact with the Eritrean and Bedouin communities ... Yet the fluidity of perspective in the novel, which shifts between various characters’ viewpoints and that of a rather intrusive third-person narrator, sometimes within the same paragraph, is also problematic. While it can create a nice ambiguity, blurring the divide between the self and the other, it also has the side-effect of making characters sound disconcertingly articulate about their self-deceptions.
