The Dhow House
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A lushly imagined novel that asks, “When do we ever really know ourselves?”
When Rebecca Laurelson is forced to leave her post as a trauma surgeon in an east African field hospital, she arrives at her aunt’s house on the Indian Ocean and is taken into the heart of a family she has never met before. It’s a world of all-night beach parties and constant cocktail receptions, and within its languorous embrace her attraction for her much younger cousin grows.
But the gilded lives of her aunt Julia’s family and their fellow white Africans on the coast are under threat — Islamist terror attacks are on the rise and Rebecca knows more about this violence than she is prepared to reveal. Will she be able to save her newfound family from the violence that encroaches on their seductive lives? Or, amidst growing unrest, will the true reason for her hasty exit from her posting be unmasked? Rebecca finds herself torn between the family she hardly knows and a past she dares not divulge.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is an interesting but somewhat disappointing novel from McNeil, who has won PRISM International awards for her fiction and nonfiction. The contemporary story begins as Rebecca Laurelson takes time off from her job as a field surgeon in East Africa and goes to stay with her aunt and cousins, whom she barely knows, in an unnamed country, on the coast of the Indian Ocean. They are white Africans whose wealth and privilege distance them from the black majority. During this extended visit, Rebecca begins a relationship with her much younger cousin, Storm. The family starts to understand that the unrest elsewhere in the country will not leave them unaffected, but tragedy strikes before they can depart. Nothing is quite as it seems; Rebecca is not just an innocent, altruistic medic, and it turns out to be no accident that she was posted to her family's country. McNeil excels at descriptions of the landscape and wildlife, but in the early sections of the book, with little else to give the story ballast, that aspect feels overdone. The book keeps circling around the same points with little forward movement of either characters or plot. The novel's second half gathers momentum and draws readers in, but both the relationships and the intrigue remain underdeveloped.
