Girls of Riyadh - Rajaa Alsanie

Once a week an anonymous modern-day Scheherazade tells a growing email list of strangers the intertwining stories of four friends, all girls of Riyadh studying at the university. Sadeem was raised by her father after her mother died shortly after her birth; she meets a man who seems perfect, and they become engaged, but between the signing of the wedding papers and their marriage party their relationship irrevocably changes. Qamrah follows her mother's advice and is not too eager for the embrace of her husband, the result of an arranged marriage, but her strategy seems to have backfired when he still hasn't touched her, a week after their marriage and, alone in Chicago, she has nobody to turn to for advice. Lamees is the most centred of the group, and the most successful - her career and her marriage work well, and she acts as the grounding stone for her friends. Mashael, known as Michelle, was raised in America for the first part of her life and, the product of a Saudi father and an American mother, has difficulty fitting into either culture but makes her decision when she falls for Faisal, a man who seems to be her soul mate - at least until his mother finds out.
This complex, layered story has been translated from the original into English, and undoubtedly loses a a lot of the nuance and texture as a result - the author notes in the introduction to the English version that she had to drop all the dialects that would place characters for native readers, and - as a non-Arabic speaker - I wholly missed how characters were named to indicate aspects of their personality.
Despite missing these elements, present in the original, Girls of Riyadh works well - the intertwining stories, particularly in combination with the background (which is often prominently in the foreground) of modern Saudi life was fascinating, and Alsanie does a magnificent job of individualising the young women. The men generally come off less well, and made me particularly appreciative of Australian men - hypocritical, sexist and whipped by their mothers, they leave a trail of broken-hearted women in their wake.
A friend loaned me her copy of Girls of Riyadh, which she brought back with her after recently returning from a year in the Kingdom, and we spent some time both before and after I read the novel discussing her experiences and those of her colleagues. I'm appreciative of the second-hand knowledge and quite happy for it to stay second-hand. I must say that, after talking with her, I'd be really interested in reading the (non-existent, as far as I know) companion piece Boys of Riyadh, which could touch on the prevalence of so-called transient homosexuality, as well as the internal contradictions of the masculine aspect of modern Saudi society. - Alex