Not all that well written, though I do like the epistolary format. It's pretty readable, if you can handle the gushing. ( )

So much more than just 'the Saudi Sex & the City'!

'Saudi Arabia' and 'chick lit' are not words which you expect to see in close proximity, but Girls of Riyadh is just that: a Middle Eastern take on Sex and the City, looking at the lives and loves of four young Saudi women from privileged backgrounds.

As chick lit, it's not incredibly engaging; it's not a genre I'm usually wild about, and Alsanea doesn't have the writing skills to make the girl-meets-boy aspect of the novel terribly fresh. There's a lot of telling-not-showing, little...more 'Saudi Arabia' and 'chick lit' are not words which you expect to see in close proximity, but Girls of Riyadh is just that: a Middle Eastern take on Sex and the City, looking at the lives and loves of four young Saudi women from privileged backgrounds.

As chick lit, it's not incredibly engaging; it's not a genre I'm usually wild about, and Alsanea doesn't have the writing skills to make the girl-meets-boy aspect of the novel terribly fresh. There's a lot of telling-not-showing, little depth to the characters, and I don't think Girls of Riyadh would have received much attention were it not for its context. But its context was what made it an interesting read for me. It's so rare, in the West, to get an account of what life is like for young women within Saudi Arabia, and it was interesting to see what aspects of her culture Alsanea clearly likes, and how much her faith is important to her, as well as to see what aspects she deplores. (The decision of one of the characters to wear hijab full-time is greeted by the others as a 'bold spiritual step'—challenging to the preconceptions of a Western reader?) In some ways, it's a very sad and dispiriting novel to read: the characters she writes about are intelligent and educated and wealthy, yet their lives are still circumscribed in a number of ways that are both familiar to me and not. There is never any question, it seems, of any of them not getting married: they can only be fulfilled through love-expressed-as-marriage. I'm not sure if that was because Alsanea felt she could go thus-far-and-no-further in her critique, or if she could just not envision something beyond the ending she gave them for her characters.

Lastly, as a translation, I'm not sure how successful it was. The foreword states that it was difficult to capture the original style—a blend of literary Arabic with slang, regional dialects and class markers—in English, and that shows in the rather flat and weak English prose. The styles jar sometimes, as do the shifts in tense and point of view, made all the more frustrating when you don't know if that's mostly a result of the translator, the original author, or Arabic/Saudi literary conventions shaping the book in a way that I'm just not used to. ( )

This book was engaging, honest, and very well crafted... and the translator did an excellent job on his/her end. This was Chick Lit done Saudi-style, based off real-life friendships of the author. The book was initially written as a series of emails to a Yahoo group, and it was only by sheer luck (and probably due to the email groups' massive popularity that grew with every installment) that it got picked up and turned into a book. The author admits that some of her friends ended up turning on her and she hasn't spoken to them since, while others thought having Alsanea write their stories down was a wonderful idea and supported her through the process. It was a great eye-opener to get behind the scenes of the lives of Saudi women... it's really not a perspective you can get from anyone BUT somebody from the inside, and I applaud Alsanea for taking the risk to tell her story and allow us to catch a glimpse of the limits and restrictions Saudi women have to live with every day of their lives. ( )

Rajaa Alsanea has taken quite a normal subject and made it a hot topic. How? Simply, the private lives of Saudi Arabian girls/women are not the subject of discussion. That is not only the case in the rest of the world, but in Saudi Arabia itself, which is trying very hard to deny the natural human condition exemplified by the natural curiosity of boys and girls for each other.

And despite the fact that the writing style (even given consideration for its being a translation from the Arabic) is not particularly exceptional, the other-worldliness of the story itself is absorbing for the reader.

I came away convinced that the Saudi Arabian model can’t really last in the modern world. If nothing else, young people are simply too curious about the other sex. Given modern technologies, it is becoming more and more difficult to deny them that access, despite keeping them physically separate.

In the Saudi Arabia of today, the result is rather sad. Girls who grow up exposed to the modern, international world grow up with a dreamy and unrealistic vision of what a relationship should and can be. A simplified view of the issue: these girls grow up to be twentysomethings whose view of a successful relationship is an overinflated version of the infatuation that most twelve- to thirteen-year-olds experience. The difference is that in the rest of the world, those girls experience the disappointment of unrequited love; misunderstandings; differing expectations; and their own personal development, in which they see the other person not as an answer to all their needs and problems, but as a partner who can learn and grow with them as they grow old together.

The boys have the same problem, of course. Only, in their case, once they realise (also rather late) that their partner is not the answer to all their needs, they have more options at hand. After all, they run Saudi Arabia, and finding other women, either on a temporary or permanent basis, is a very acceptable solution.

Needless to say, the proportion of disappointed marriages must be awesome. ( )