I’m judging a 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

“There are orange trees in the courtyard, planted by the children the previous year; the NGO workers had wanted something bright and encouraged the youngest children to tie cheap ribbons to the branches, but they’d forgotten about the muddy season, and now the ribbons flap limply, streaked in dirt.” - gah! Sure this is only the second graph in the novel but as I explained previous I’m reading at first with one eye towards the exit, I’ve got so many piles to get through and when I hit a paragraph like this, a let myself settle in, I know I’m gonna wanna read the whole thing.

Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City is a complex drama centered on the Nasr family and their roots in Lebanon and Syria. As someone who married into a Lebanese family, I was immediately attracted to the book’s description.
With parents Idris and Mazna on the West Coast, son Mimi in Texas, daughter Ava on the East Coast, and daughter Naj back in Lebanon, family members rarely get together and communicate by phone and online, often reluctantly because of their different life situations and secrets.

After the grandfather’s death in Beirut, his son Idris in California decides time has arrived to sell the ancestral home. Wife and mother Mazna begins to pressure Ava and Mimi to join Idris and her in Beirut, initially concocting a reason that they must go. Telling Naj that her parents and siblings would soon descend on Beirut seems almost an afterthought. With her own reasons for having chosen to attend American University in Beirut and to remain there far away from everyone else, Naj does not welcome the news.

The point of view shifts between characters, giving long looks into the private lives of the various family members in the U.S. and, going back years to parents’ early lives in Syria and Lebanon. Reviews indicate that these sections lose some readers, bothered by intimate sexual details and repeated use of the f-word. While I might not have requested the book had I known some of its content, I would have missed a powerful, interesting political and personal story.

As the family converges on Beirut, with some members dead set against Idris’ determination to sell the home where he grew up and which is now the family’s one connection to the “old country,” Alyan sets the scene for family drama, for bickering and squabbling, and for the revelation of personal lives and secrets that years of distance have allowed them to conceal.

The Arsonists’ City is a long book, apparently too long for some readers, but its length allows Alyan to tell a multi-faceted story of history, politics, and family, of love and loss, dreams and failure, weakness and strength, immigrant experience and ancestral ties.

Thanks to NetGalley, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Hala Alyan for the advance reader copy of this moving book.

4.5/5 Stars
This was such a lovely story about love and war, and the legacy it leaves on a family so deeply impacted by the conflicts of the Middle East. This is a touching story told across time, and across family members as they all gather in Beirut as they all fight to not have their ancestral home sold.

The narrative is told from the mother; Manza, and her children, Ava, Mimi, and Naj. Their stories intertwine as the jump from present to past in how they ended up as a family, with Idris as their patriarch, and the secrets they all share. I really loved the family dynamic in this story; of how everyone relates to each other differently; and who they choose to share secrets with. I can't wait to read more work by Hala!

This book is electrifying. From the first paragraph, I was deeply emotionally invested in these characters and how they reacted to discovering one another's secrets. In some ways, it reminds me of A Place For Us, although the language is not quite as lyrical -- it's more arresting and gritty, although still beautiful. If you like generational family dramas, this would be a great read for you. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advance review copy.

Every so often I read a book that grips me without letting go and it changes me. (Books on this list include Homegoing, A Place for Us and The Beauty of Your Face for example). A couple of days I started Hala Alyan’s new book “The Arsonists City” and this book has joined that list - I couldn’t stop reading until I finished. This book is about Ava, Naj and Mimi and their parents Mazan and Idris and a journey back to Beirut to sell a family home (I’m being vague because I didn’t look up anything about this book before I started and that was a lovely way to read) and in telling this story, switches from the perspective of different family members to unfold their individual and connected storie and their relationships with one another. It is about Beirut and Syria, about America, about relationships between partners, about marriage, about relationships between siblings, the way we people we love have the power to uplift and hurt us the most, the forgiveness and re-forgiveness and anger and acceptance that life involves. It is fantastic, I’m pre-ordering a copy so I have it in print. It comes out March 9 and this is a SEVEN STAR READ. Thank you Net Galley for a copy of this book!

The first chapter was extremely engaging. I was eager to read the family saga. The book lost me graphic details about the characters' most intimate moments. It ended up being a DNF for me. but for others that do not mind or enjoy that sort of content, I think the book would be an interesting read.

This is a story about family, and secrets, about the search for authenticity and a life that captures what our hearts deem to be essential. This is a largely character driven novel with a LOT of characters, and the story is long - maybe too long - so the whole thing feels kind of meandering and lazy, until the secrets begin to be revealed, and then the story is gripping and compelling, until it isn’t again, which is all to say that I found the book to be unevenly written, despite the beauty of the prose. I have mixed feelings about this book, but am left with a swirl of thoughts about love and loss, about dreams and hope, about selfish acts and regret, and about the ways time both diminishes and amplifies the secrets we keep, or think we are keeping, but that aren’t as hidden as we’d like to believe.

This. Book.

The Arsonists’ City is about a family on the brink of being torn apart by secrets and jealousy. It is about politics, war, and ideals. Bravery and shame. Love and loss. Desire and destiny. Truth and forgiveness.

Set in Syria, Lebanon, and the USA across different points of time and through different points of view, the author created a stunning structure for the story to unfold upon. The characters and storyline were layered and complex while also being accessible and relatable. I fell in love with each and every one of the characters in The Arsonists’ City, partly for their flaws and imperfections but also for their undeniable beauty.

It seems ridiculous to say so early in the year, but this book will surely be a contender for best book of the year. It is a stunning story that will stay with me for a long time.

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advance copy of this book which will be published next month. The opinions in this review are entirely my own.

This book has everything I typically love in a book.
Family saga, a story with roots in the Middle East, a story intertwined with love, loss and the sense of belonging through ancestral bonds.

The Nasr family is spread across the globe. There is Mazana, the Syrian mother, Idris, the Lebanese father and their 3 adult children who were raised in America after the young marries couple came to America seeking asylum.

When Idris's father dies, he decides it's time to sell the ancestral house in Beirut, and this brings the whole family back to Beirut to face the past and all it's secrets.
With strong character development throughout the book, some of the choices made are questionable and shocking and had me gasping out loud and also had me in tears.

I highly recommend this book.
Thank you Netgalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourd for the e-ARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest revies.

First of all, Hala Alyan is a true wordsmith.
There is no arguing the excellence in her craft, the vividness of her imagery and her acute perception of human nature. I simply wanted to swoon over her words. I cracked a smile every time she nailed the description of the Arab disposition whether she meant a person or a nation (I probably should note that I'm an Arab who lived most of her life in what is universally dubbed as the Middle East).

Nevertheless, the book left me at a loss. It opened magnificently with a scene from a refugees camp of a man being dragged out of camp and beaten to death for an act he has committed. That scene ended there and then without explanation and I couldn't relate the rest of the story to that gripping beginning.

The story shifts to three long chapters comprising Part I. The three children of the Nasr Family, Palestinian-Syrian immigrants, are leading different lives. Ava, the eldest, is a biologist by day and upper class burnt out wife by night. Marwan, the middle child, is an ageing artist, who couldn't make it big on the music scene. Naj is an uprising musical phenomenon who struggles with her sexuality. One day their father decides to sell their house in Beirut, the only property they still held onto on Arab soil before immigrating to the States. The family makes the trip back to Beirut. Because each chapter was so long, it felt like a collection of novellas.

The story shifts again to Mazna's, their mother, childhood and early youth. in a period marked by political upheavals during the Lebanese Civil War and the Syrian Occupation of Lebanon.

After a huge lump of narrative, we find ourselves back again into the children's lives as they make the trip to the summer house in Beirut. and the cycle, laboriously, repeats itself.

I understand that the shifting timelines between the children's individual stories and that of their mother were meant as a juxtaposition, but the huge chunks of storylines paired with elaborating on the minutest details of the sex life of each character instead of alternating between timelines at a more accelerating pace completely defeated the purpose.

The story spiralled into ZWARIB (alleyways and deadends), to borrow Ava's description of her mother's conversations.

Although the Nasr family are described as "progressive", the book had many stereotypes: the queer rockstar, the burnt-out upper-crust wife. Another downside was the multitude of topics Alyan brushed over (Hezbollah Bombings, Syrian revolution, Lebanese Civil War, Syrian occupation of Lebanon, the refugees' crisis, the Lebanese civil war, immigration, sexual identities, adultery, siblings rivalry). It was dizzying.

This is a very ambitious book. The writing is beyond doubt beautiful. But I got lost in the midst of everything it attempted to accomplish.

A family spread out across the globe is reunited in Beirut when their patriarch declares his intention to sell the family home. Idris and Mazna and their three children Ava, Mimi, and Naj gather together. Idris is originally from Beirut, Mazna from Damascus; they have lived in California since early in their marriage, their children now spread across the world with Naj having returned to Beirut – a reverse migration – where she has become a successful musician.

The family is close but separated. They are in frequent contact with each other but rarely together. The history between them – both as a whole and individually – is fragmented and full of things unsaid. The story moves between each of these five characters as well as through the years. The present day sections alternate between the three adult children, each with their own relationship and career struggles, while the sections in the past primarily zoom in on Mazna and a secret that she has been keeping for years.

The Arsonists’ City spends quite a bit of time laying the groundwork, introducing characters and backgrounds before dipping into the past and the beginnings of Idris and Mazna’s relationship. While there is definite conflict in the present day timeline, the main drama all comes from the past. This isn’t to say that the present day sections aren’t interesting. The interest there lies in the adult children reconnecting as they learn the truth about their own family history. There is also interest in the developing dynamics between the three siblings. Both Ava and Mimi are struggling in their long-term relationships; Mimi’s fiancee has joined the family trip to Beirut while Ava’s husband has stayed home. Both are white Americans. Mimi has been plugging away for years with his unsuccessful band while his younger sister, Naj, has become hugely successful with her own music in the Middle East and Europe.

Where Alyan really shines though is in her writing of place. The sections of the novel set in Beirut and Damascus are where the novel comes alive, particularly in the past. When Mazna and Idris are young, in the late 1960s, Beirut is at war while Damascus is a thriving city. Mazna sneaks across the border into Beirut with friends, exposed for the first time both to greater wealth and greater danger. In the present day, the roles of the cities seem reversed, with refugees from Syria moving into and through Lebanon. The links between these two countries were clearer to me than ever before. I’ve read a few books involving Syria in recent years but Lebanon is largely unknown to me. It did feel strange to read a story about Beirut without any reference to the horrifying explosion that took place there in 2020 but of course, Alyan’s novel was written before these events.

As I was finishing The Arsonists’ City, I realized that Alyan’s previous novel Salt Houses has been on my TBR for some time and I borrowed it from the library, eager for more of her writing.

Another stunning family saga from Hala Alyan! The novel follows two primary storylines: In the present day, three Arab-American siblings (living in New York City, Austin and Beirut) are dealing with their own lives while attempting to fend off their mother Mazna's requests to all return to Beirut for the summer to sell their ancestral home. In the other storyline, we get to see Mazna coming of age in Syria and Lebanon during the tumultuous 1970s and later immigrating to the United States.

Life in this book is messy, heartbreaking and beautiful, and while at times the plot appeared to veer toward the predictable or even trite, I found that knowing the characters' secrets before they did added a delicious layer of tension to my reading experience. Additionally, while almost all the characters said or did things that were nearly unforgivable, I couldn't help but love them.

I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This book will be released on March 9, 2021.

The book opens with the murder of a boy named Zakaria, who we don't meet again for many pages. Instead, we meet the Nasr family, who is spread across the globe. Mazna, who is from Syria and her husband, Idris, who is from Lebanon, live in California, but their children live all over the world. After Idris' father dies, he decides to sell his father's home. The entire family travels to Beirut for a memorial and to try to convince him not to sell the home.

The characters in this novel are so well developed. Each of Mazna and Idris' children have their own relationships, secrets, jealousies, and regrets. But the most interesting aspect of the book, for me, was the flashbacks that showed Mazna's past - the person she once was, how she met Idris, and the secrets she has been holding onto for so many years. When you contrast the chapters of Mazna's past to the present day, you cannot help but understand how she became the person she is.

I was much more interested in Mazna's story than everything happening in the present. Sometimes I would find myself being upset when it would switch back to the present. But after reading the entire book, I think that the inclusion of all of her children's stories and how it all weaves together is what makes this novel so powerful. I gave this novel five stars and I can't wait to buy a copy for my own bookshelf.

TW: abortion, violence

Thank you to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the ARC!

This story was captivating. I loved getting to focus on each sibling on their own, but the stores still intertwined on one another.

I liked Maznas story and well, and it was important to understand her and the family's dynamic but portions of her story dragged a bit.

Seeing a glimpse into a world and lives I'll never know was fascinating. This book transports you to another world and time.

I adored this novel. A beautiful family saga that lets you sink into its world. The characters are flawed and tragic and I was rooting for each of them. This will absolutely be one of my favorite reads of the year.

I loved this book! I was pulled in right away and wanted to savor every part of the story. The complex look at family secrets and sibling relationships drew me in and made me feel part of these characters lives. My heart was aching and I cried a few times throughout the novel as I got to know these people.

Also enjoyed the switching POVs and timelines to get an in depth look at each character’s life (if you know me, you know I loooove a good novel with multiple perspectives and time periods). The ending felt perfect but I’m definitely going to have a book hangover.

The story makes me want to learn more about Lebanon and the conflicts discussed throughout the book. I learned a lot about the 60s-70s in Lebanon and Syria that I had no idea about. Will definitely be reading more of Alyan’s novels!! And I may even need to get a physical copy of this to add to my favorites shelf- Highly highly recommend.

Thank you Netgalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the eARC! All the opinions above are my own.

Triggers: war, violence, gun violence (brief mention), death, xenophobia, sexual content, gambling (brief), infidelity, body shaming, drug use, homophobia, Alzheimer’s, sexual assault, grief, toxic relationships, racism, depression, abortion, aggravated assault, medical trauma

An emotional family saga that is spans the wars in Lebanon, then Syria, the Palestinian displacement and the immigrant experience in the United States.

I received this from Netgalley.com.

"The Nasr family is spread across the globe—Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. All have lived a life of migration but they’ve always had their ancestral home in Beirut."

A slow paced story which felt a bit dragged out.

3☆

When I read Salt Houses by Hala Alyan I was blown away by her superb writing and the characters she created so it's fair to say I was super enthused about reading her latest novel <b>Arsonist's City</b>.    That enthusiasm was well rewarded within moments of starting and never let up.     Alyan's prologue had me in its grips from the first sentence to the last, her words instantly transporting me to a refugee camp in Beirut where she set the scene for a violent death, retribution for a past wrong doing.   Within in a few short pages she built tension,  introduced a religious war, created a character to care about, introduced two others by association, and revealed a pivotal event which would change many lives.  

Part One was a complete change of pace from the Prologue.   It quickly became apparent Alyan's story had leapt forward by thirty or forty years as readers were introduced to three siblings,  Ava, Mimi and Naj.    We come to understand they're the adult offspring of Mazna and Idris the two others mentioned in the Prologue.     Not only do we find out their secrets and inner thoughts but we learn something of their backgrounds and their present day lives.    Alyan has an incredible talent for creating realistic and delightfully flawed characters with such depth to each one.   As readers you may cheer on or be appalled by their actions but you can't fail to feel the tug and pull of their desires and appreciate the mindset that lead them to behave that way.

As the story progressed it alternated between the present and the past.   We hear how and why Mazna and Idris married, how he'd been granted asylum and moved to America.    Individually they dreamed big.   Idris was to become a heart specialist whilst Mazna yearned for Hollywood.     Acting was the thing for which she'd achieved a small measure of success in Damascus and she hoped to put this artistic talent to good use in America.    Unfortunately, assimilation was not so easy.    

For much of the present day storyline the Nasr family were all together in Beirut.   Back in the family home for one last time before Idris sells it.      This alone was a divisive issue but as is often the case when families spend extended periods of time together things are off key.     They grated on each other.   They squabbled.   Long repressed jealousies and resentments rose to the surface.     A recurring theme throughout was  "People deserve to have their secrets" and my goodness did this family have plenty.      From lies of omission to outright deceptions.    This family's love for each other was complex but as they spent more time together in miniscule ways they seemed to be gelling and getting closer.

Like the Nasr family the story was complex and multilayered and
I've struggled to do justice to this book as there were so many topics I wanted to touch upon.    The lasting impacts of war and the lives of refugees.    The loneliness of moving to a faraway land,  the immigrant experience of never truly and fully assimilating due to cultural differences.   The need for secrets and dramatic steps taken to keep them.  The joys of being blessed with artistic talents and the disappointments and frustrations of having to suppress these same qualities.    So many missed opportunities and loves lost.   I was moved by the story and the writing and would encourage other readers to give this book a try.     Meanwhile I'll be watching out for any future book Alyan writes.  She's not to be missed.

Thanks to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and NetGalley for the opportunity of reading this digital ARC in exchange for an honest review which it was my pleasure to provide.
4.5 stars on Goodreads

DNF @ 58%. Thanks HMH and NetGalley for the e-ARC. I hate to do this since I loved Alyan’s debut novel, but this book is entirely too long and lacks the emotional resonance from any one character or story to propel the plot.