Told through a prism of female voices, this debut follows five women with vastly different origins—from the Philippines to Ethiopia to New York City—whose lives bring them to the Arabian Gulf, where they collide with profound consequences.
In short, compact chapters, we weave and wind between characters’ perspectives. These women are nuanced and complicated, and their strengths and flaws, which lead them toward compliance or defiance, are tautly felt in the prose ... Gulf brought me, as a reader, into an unfamiliar landscape and lives that were seemingly different from my own—and yet I found myself connecting with the characters, hoping for them, and seeing the complexity of their struggles, in ways that are particular to place, time and culture, yet extend beyond those boundaries. These five voices are jarring, surprising, compelling and deeply human.
A passionate if uneven look at the physical and emotional violence that women migrants face in the Persian Gulf region in particular, where tens of millions of foreign workers live today. Unfortunately, the premise tying together these disparate characters is as tenuous as it sounds, resulting in a portrait of women in the Middle East that feels reductive, at times even stereotypical ... Ogrodnik writes in cinematic scenes that move quickly between these five perspectives. Perhaps as a result of the fast pace, Ogrodnik’s protagonists often feel more like archetypes of victim and victimizer than flesh-and-blood individuals ... Zeinah is neither a migrant nor living in a Persian Gulf state, and her inclusion in the novel does little more than evoke the stereotype that a story about the Middle East must somehow include a terrorist. Joining Al-Khansaa, she falls easily into the sadism of ordering the public torture of women who disobey Shariah law, and Ogrodnik describes her inner turmoil with a heavy hand ... The dialogue too can be didactic ... There may be a point to this flattening, to collapsing distant regions into one narrative, and reducing whole lives to symbols of privilege or lack ... But to come to life on the page, fictional characters and places cannot be reduced to generalizations.
An unflinching recitation of everyday horrors ... In a cyclical narrative that delivers the women’s stories in a series of cinematic episodes, Ogrodnik’s debut novel offers a chronicle of women’s lives constrained by forces including patriarchal control, cultural misunderstanding, economic disparity, political fervor, and garden-variety jealousy and bigotry. The plight of emigrant domestic workers is sharply portrayed, as are the myriad compromises and adjustments made by women facing life in an environment more repressive than the ones they’re accustomed to. The animating force in their common unending struggle is captured in Flora’s musing that 'hope is a rebel.'
