It was ok. It's obvious Malek is a journalist first and foremost as the writing was painfully flat. This was particularly true during the first half of the book where she introduces her family and details her family history back multiple generations. It was tedious and lacked any energy or connection that made me perceive these names as real people. I nearly quit reading during that long tedious family history.

Fortunately, when she got into the second half of the book with the civil war and the struggles faced by residents, the book improves and it becomes the fascinating insight into Syria that I had hoped to read.

This book was fascinating. In this time when Syria and the Middle East are constantly in the news and often viewed with suspicion, this book is inherently important.

I'm not sure why I did not leave feedback sooner as I really enjoyed this book. It was interesting reading different viewpoints from the generations in this way.

Alia Malek journeyed back to Damascus to claim the home that her grandmother lived in and loved. She returned as a woman who had lived in America, but also had a long history to trace in Syria. In The Home That Was Our Country, she delves into the history of her family while reporting the atmosphere in her homeland from Arab Spring in 2011 until she left two years later.

I was really interested in learning about recent and long-term Syrian history from someone who lived there. Unfortunately, I had a hard time with this story. Malek has clearly done her research and dives deeply into both her family's history and the history of the country that she loves so dearly. She writes deftly about the families who lived in her family's neighborhood as well as the necessity of changing what you can say, depending on the people you are talking to. But the writing was a bit dry and I sometimes had to force myself to pick it up and continue reading. The Home That Was Our Country might be a good pick for you, though, if you want an in-depth history of Syria told through the story of one family.

The Home That Was Our Country
A Memoir of Syria
By Alia Malek
Nation Books February 2017
304 pages
Read via Netgalley

I have also been reading THE HOME THAT WAS OUR COUNTRY by Alia Malek in which she tells of her family's multi-generational story interwoven with the history of Syria. It's a fascinating read, but honestly it is probably a bit too complex for our students who are struggling to understand the current politics and conflicting pressures in that war-torn region. However, adults will be impressed, particularly if they have background knowledge and an interest in the region. Starred reviews from both Booklist and Publishers Weekly.

The Home That Was Our Country

I try hard to follow be plight of Syria and it's people and so was eager to read this book by Malek.

What I read was a stunning story teeming with incredibly well researched subjects. This book deserves massive respect and acclaim and I cannot give it any less than 5*.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher.

Journalist and civil rights lawyer Alia Malek was born in Baltimore to Syrian parents. With the memory of her beloved grandmother Salma, the matriarch of their large extended family, and Salma's apartment in Damascus, she always felt a strong connection and pull to the country. Her parents themselves had always intended to return home, but thanks to strict tenant laws on a rented unit in her grandmother's building, it was decades before they could take possession of it again and renovate and restore it as her grandmother had always intended.

In this multigenerational saga, both national history and family memoir, Malek tells her family's history beginning with her great-grandfather, beautifully interweaving her family's triumphs and heartbreaks with those of the country. Both endured turbulent decades, and the rise and fall of peace and prosperity in Syria itself seems to be mirrored in the family.

She effortlessly ties together these narrative threads, including that of her own immediate family in Baltimore, always longing to return to Damascus and a tight-knit family life but frustrating thwarted in their attempts to do so. Instead their lives, and by default hers, take very different paths than what they'd ever expected. That's what much of both her family's and Syria's history is, and this theme is woven beautifully throughout the stories here - you don't always get the life you wanted, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

The history of Syria and its Middle Eastern neighbors is complex and can be quite confusing for outsiders. With Syria and its refugees thrust onto the world stage in the last two years, questions about how the country arrived at its current state are common, but not so simply answered. Malek is deeply interested in geopolitics, and she has an impressive knack for carefully explaining Syria's history, from her great-grandparents in the 1940s to Bashar al-Assad's authoritarian regime, including analyses of the effects of various military actions and political upheavals. It should be required reading for anyone studying or reporting on Syria and the Middle East. Or who even wants to talk about it. Read this first.

What I don't know about Syria could fill several books, but this is an excellent starting place to understand anything about the country and its people. There's so much to learn, and her skillful storytelling is the perfect voice to tell these oft-complicated and difficult to follow histories. I was continually astounded. Even from the basics, like the blend of Christians and Muslims who coexisted peacefully, including within the same apartment building run by her grandmother. The family and their neighbors are like a microcosm for the connections and divides of the greater region.

And although her sense for breaking down the complexities of the geopolitical is impressive, it's really her talent as a storyteller that shines. She describes so richly the scenery, the atmosphere, the people - her words and the story are immersive and haunting. In her journalism and legal work, she's crossed many borders and been able to interact with and hear the stories of people from different walks of life. Their collection here, bound so tightly to the fates of hard-won autonomies and sometimes shaky democracies, lost to abusive dictatorships and thrown into chaos with the Arab Spring, are impacting and enlightening.

Her reporting especially following the Arab Spring is powerful, as is her shadowing of Syrian protesters and refugees. As Europe and America have erupted in xenophobia over the issue of accepting refugees, Malek helps give faces and identities to the people involved, and to succinctly explain what's happened over decades to bring them to this place.

On her return to Syria in 2011, Malek writes that "Syria was on the precipice of something better. For an optimist, Syria was on the precipice of something better. For the pessimist, it teetered dangerously on the abyss." She identifies as an optimist, and that optimism coupled with tireless action and a remarkable sensitivity to others along with an intelligent understanding of the entire region's delicate geopolitics puts her in a unique position to contribute to the country, the region, and to share her family's history. With such a rich narrative voice and writing style, it's impossible not to be moved by the stories she tells.