Bibliofreakblog

Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea

Touted as the Sex and the City of Saudi Arabia, Girls of Riyadh exposes a world hidden from the West.  Intentionally hidden or not, most people in the West do not understand life in other cultures.  That there could be such a book set in Saudi Arabia and compared to Sex and the City is hard to imagine.  When people asked me what this book was about when they saw me reading it, I flipped it over to the back and pointed to the blurb from Time magazine, which says “Imagine Sex and the City, if the city in question were Riyadh.”  You’d be surprised how many baffled looks and mild arguments started over this. 

Now, I’m not going to pretend that I know what it is like to grow up as a female in Saudi Arabia, but I can assure you that Rajaa Alsanea does, considering the fact that she is a female who grew up in Saudi Arabia.  And while her characters come from only the upper crust of that society and she does not attempt to portray the lives of those in a lower socio-economic bracket than herself, she does illustrate a point that we in the West may be missing when we start arguments about whether or not a book set in Saudi Arabia could be compared to Sex and the City.  Just because the lives of these characters are secluded in comparison to the lives of people in the West, doesn’t mean that they are not real thinking feeling people underneath their abayas.

The novel is set up as if the reader is a member of the fictional Yahoo! Group seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com, getting the inside scoop on the narrator’s friends in weekly e-mails.  As the novel progresses, the popularity of the group does as well, for good or ill.  She mentions the e-mails she gets both praising and condemning her for what she writes.

Alsanea originally wrote it in Arabic, for Saudis in particular, and it is assumed that the reader is Saudi, or has some understanding of Saudi culture.  The English version includes helpful footnotes so that the reader doesn’t miss out on any inside jokes. 

While I was not surprised that the four girls in this book talk about boys, try to show off in front of potential mother-in-laws, sneak behind their families backs, or any of the other things they do, I was taken off guard by their love of designer clothes.  I felt like an idiot for being surprised, like I did an internal double take at my double take.  What, did I think, like one mother does in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, that women wear their abayas all day and must have to be careful not get flour all over themselves while baking?  Seriously.  I mean, what woman doesn’t love clothes?  The females in Saudi Arabia only wear their abayas in the presence of nonfamilial men.  At weddings, the women have their own private celebration, during which they tear up the dance floor in their Badgley Mishka dresses.  Not only that, but they diet and work out to stay in shape. 

And, it turns out they all have five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot.  Imagine that!  *rolls eyes*

Not that all is happy gossip.  Love still sucks, babies can’t fix a marriage, and trying to balance a career and family will always be a challenge.  This is one of those cases where it is the characters’ flaws that make them into human beings-probably ones you’ve met before, right here in the West.
Buy Girls of Riyadh on Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell
One Fifth Avenue by Candace Bushnell
The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak
Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil by Deborah Rodriguez and Kristin Ohlson
Infidel by Ayaab Hirsi Ali
Essential Rumi by Jalal Al-Din Rumi
On Entering the Sea: The Erotic and Other Poetry of Nizar Qabbani by Nizar Qabbani
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding

Other works by Rajaa Alsanea:

none