A review by margaretefg
Chronicle of a Last Summer: A Novel of Egypt by Yasmine El Rashidi

2.0

I wanted to like this book more than I did. The first section, set in 1984 when the narrator is a young girl, limps along because of how little she knows and understands about what is going on around her. The best sections are when the adults in her life talk to her about the Free Officers, or other aspects of Egyptian politics, but those are tiny snatches. We also get glimpses of how Cairo changes physically through the book (the second section is set in 1998, and the third kind of in 2014, but it sometimes reaches back to 2011, 2013...) There's a lot less here than it seems as if there could be...lots of the narrator wondering about her mother's silences, or thinking how she'd like to make films or write novels.