This book left me with impressions more than anything else. Not sure if it's the writing or the translation, but it's disjointed and fragmented; I loved parts of it, and parts of it confused me.

- Nirica from Team Champaca

The stop-and-start writing is the opposite of engaging. This kind of 'fragmented' narrative can work is the prose is good. Here, maybe because of the translation, the writing is just very dull. Unconnected scenes and thoughts follow one another in a rather frustrating way. And maybe I could have enjoyed it if the language had anything to offer. Here there are a few simplistic observations and a few purply metaphors.
Pity, because the cover and title are really good.

Interestingly told, abstract and dreamlike narrative from an 18 year old girl from Algeria, living in Paris and exploring her sexuality. The text moves backwards and forwards through time fluidly throughout the novel, looking back on her childhood in Algeria and her time spent at her grandparents house in France and coming back to the present, often within the space of one paragraph. Whilst this sometimes made the narrative hard to follow, it was very evocative, painting a vivid picture of the mixed emotions and confused history of the protagonist.

I didn’t really enjoy this autobiographical novel. It had what should have been an interesting plot, covering tensions in Algeria and the lesbian nightclub scene of 80s Paris, but it was all just told so flatly that I couldn’t bring myself to care about it or the protagonist, even when horrible things were happening to her and her family. As a work in translation, I obviously can never be sure if this is an issue with the text itself or with the translation. It also has a confusing structure, moving backwards and forwards in time without so much as a paragraph break.