Too Soon
A Novel
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
“Fiercely funny, sexy, and culturally resonant.” —People, Best Books of the Month • “Shamieh balances her characters’ painful family history and their boisterously funny voices.” —The New Yorker
A “wonderfully brash and sparkling” (Oprah Daily, Best Books of the Year) novel that explores exile, love, and freedom across three generations of women—“a Palestinian American Sex and the City” (The Atlantic).
Arabella gets an unexpected chance at love when she’s thrust into a conflict and history she’s tried to avoid all her life.
Zoya is playing matchmaker for her last unmarried granddaughter and stirring up buried memories.
Naya is keeping a secret from her children that will change all their lives.
Thirty-five-year-old Arabella, a New York theatre director whose dating and career prospects are drying up, is offered an opportunity to direct a risqué cross-dressing interpretation of a Shakespeare classic—that might garner international attention—in the West Bank. Her mother, Naya, and grandmother, Zoya, hatch a plot to match her with Aziz, a Palestinian American doctor volunteering in Gaza. Arabella agrees to meet Aziz, since her growing feelings for Yoav, a celebrated Israeli American theatre designer, seem destined for disaster...
With biting hilarity, Too Soon introduces us to a trio of bold and unforgettable voices. This dramatic saga follows one family’s epic journey fleeing war-torn Jaffa in 1948, chasing the American Dream in Detroit and San Francisco in the sixties and seventies, hustling in the New York theatre scene post-9/11, and daring to stage a show in Palestine in 2012. Upon learning one of them is living on borrowed time, the three women fight to live, make art, and love on their own terms. A funny, sexy, and heart-wrenching literary debut, Too Soon illuminates our shared history and asks, how can we set ourselves free?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Playwright Shamieh's debut novel tracks three generations of Palestinian American women through war, emigration, and the search for creative fulfillment. Arabella, an off-Broadway director in her mid-30s, has spent her career resisting her peers' calls to protest Israel and represent Palestinian people in her work. She's also been stymied in her attempts to land a prominent production, however, so when she's offered the chance to direct a buzzy adaptation of Hamlet, to be staged in Ramallah, she accepts, rewriting the lead character as a woman named Hamleta. In the West Bank, she meets Aziz, the grandson of a man who was the object of her grandmother Zoya's secret infatuation more than six decades earlier, before Zoya and her husband were forced to flee Jaffa during the 1948 displacement. Shamieh weaves together Arabella and Zoya's stories, along with the coming-of-age of Arabella's mother, Naya, the rebellious youngest daughter of Zoya. The novel's rapid-fire resolutions feel somewhat jarring after the expansive storytelling. Better is the character work, as Shamieh ably portrays the distinguishing traits of each of her leads—Zoya's aching desire for her lost homeland, Arabella's snarky humor, and Naya's mix of bravado and insecurity—as well as the ties that bind them, such as Arabella's theater work and Zoya's tendency to playact as a child during the British occupation. This rich saga upends received narratives about motherhood and migration.
