Excess and Myth

The limitations of the plot in The Map of Salt and Stars are arranged around the viewpoint of a thirteen year old who doesn't fully understand the language around her. The reader still gets access to what is discussed, so this limitation doesn't transfer to the experience of reading it—we don't share Nour's perspective entirely. We get reminded of her narrow understanding of Arabic regularly, and she starts to pretend she can understand less than she does in order to gain more access to the adult world, where decisions of life and death are made. Nour spends the majority of the book not understanding why they must be on the move constantly, while still managing intense feelings of grief about the loss of her father. She leans on an ancient story he used to share with her, to draw connections to the land she travels and to remember him.

While reading I was sometimes struggling to get past the flourish of the storytelling. I started to feel like the beautiful language cluttered the action of the narrative. There were so many instances when the artful language felt like it was in the way, like I had to get past it or through it to get to the action. It was so overdone, that individual poetic moments had less weight amidst the clutter of it all. I also got really tired of the synesthesia, it didn't add anything to Nour's character for me. It became predictable and corny very quickly.

All that said, I was really hooked into the dual narratives, especially the way the migrations of each character linked through time. The ancient settings of the places that Nour and her family went through populated my imagination. The way Nour clung to her Baba's story made sense of the trials they went through trying to find their way to safety. The mirroring challenges and fights were illustrative, when Huda almost got raped it lined up with Rawiya's fighting Ibn Hakim and losing Bakr. There was a strong sense that even though they escaped the young men who would have taken Huda, that something deeply important was still lost. Later in the novel when Huda loses her arm, I wondered if the infection that caused the amputation was started in that tussle.

Another time that the dual narratives lined up was when al-Idrisi and the gang are lost in the sand storm along the canyon, and Rawiya desperately tries to throw stones with her sling to knock the walls of the canyon to direct them back to safety, and Nour finds herself lost in the alleyways of Amman. Although Rawiya is responsible for finding the way, and Nour ends up cowering under a tree where Abu Sayeed finds her, the incidence of Nour running into the night/dawn seemed to be inspired by the ancient tale. These reflected narratives give the action a rhythm that is really satisfying and well-balanced, it felt like a carefully choreographed dance between the two exciting stories.

The modern story moves in and out of mythology with Nour's continued survival amid mounting dangers. The rising waters in the stowaway of the passage ship should have drowned them, yet she and Zahra both survive getting tossed on the rocks. The whole group except Abu Sayeed survive the aid boat capsizing, and she and Zahra tucked into the refrigerated truck swelled my suspension of disbelief. Yet when Nour starts to match up with the ancient story, finding the purple-green stone of the roc's eye, and "remembering" al-Idrisi's fountain home when they reach Ceuta, knowing that Uncle Ma'mun lived in the same hilltop house, that felt right to me. It was so far outside of actual possibility that it fulfilled the need I had for meaning—Nour shared that need, that there should be a reason for all this heartbreak and tumult. She wanted a connection to make sense of it all. Real life doesn't have such tidy arrangements.