Reviews for The Cry of the Dove

The average rating for The Cry of the Dove based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-06-20 00:00:00 Bumann Kassian [ When the girl discovers she is pregnant she is sent to a very rough and crude prison for her own safety, because there her father and brother cannot kill her to avenge their 'honour'. But the men have long memories and when friends of hers leave the prison they are shot dead as soon as they exit. After a long time, seven years, she is helped by nuns to escape and eventually ends up in Exeter, in England. In her thirties she marries and feeling more secure she travels back to her family, dressing herself as a foreigner to lessen the risk of being recognised, as she traces her daughter. But it is too late, she has been shot and buried for the same crime as her mother and as she weeps and wails on her daughter's grave, she too is shot dead and the father and brothers can now hold their heads up again, honour redeemed, having punished their daughters and sisters and granddaughters for the crime of falling in love with men who want nothing but sex, use no contraception and condemn their girlfriends to death should they be found out or the girl get pregnant. Where is the honour in that? (hide spoiler)]

Review # 2 was written on 2008-02-06 00:00:00 Nico Lamer If you read fiction to escape, then you read literature to fall in love, and with this love collect for your heart the fallible gestures of human judgment that mark a life as you would know it. The Cry of the Dove creates a woman easy to fall in love with because her life encompasses the most human effort: to stake and bound an identity amid conditions that are powerfully imbalanced, but quietly, lovingly, individual. The novel is constructed with evocative language and a speech broken only out the narrator's mouth, for Salma Ibrahim El-Musa, sometimes Sally Asher, is nothing if not honest in the cruelty of her self-image, her Bedouin roots never not on display for judgment by her adopted England. Like her speech, scenes of the narrative are spilled like a bag of stones, skipping from present to past, but orchestrated in a way to muse here on religion, here on birth, here on desire, here on loss. I don't know what to say that would express why I think this novel is so beautiful, just as I don't know how to encapsulate a life to make it tell as well as it feels. But I am in love with this complicated Salma, as much as with what she would hope to lightly carry as with how steadily she would march toward grace.