DAUGHTERS OF THE NILE, extraordinary sapphic family saga

DAUGHTERS OF THE NILE
ZAHARA BARRI
Unbound (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.15 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A bold multi-generational debut novel exploring themes of queerness, revolution and Islamic sisterhood.

Paris, 1940. The course of Fatiha Bin-Khalid’s life is changed forever when she befriends the Muslim feminist Doria Shafik. But after returning to Egypt and dedicating years to the fight for women’s rights, she struggles to reconcile her political ideals with the realities of motherhood.

Cairo, 1966. After being publicly shamed when her relationship with a bisexual boyfriend is revealed, Fatiha’s daughter is faced with an impossible decision. Should Yasminah accept a life she didn’t choose, or will she leave her home and country in pursuit of independence?

Bristol, 2011. British-born Nadia is battling with an identity crisis and a severe case of herpes. Feeling unfulfilled (and after a particularly disastrous one-night stand), she moves in with her old-fashioned Aunt Yasminah and realises that she must discover her purpose in the modern world before it’s too late.

Following the lives of three women from the Bin-Khalid family, Daughters of the Nile is an original and darkly funny novel that examines the enduring strength of female bonds. These women are no strangers to adversity, but they must learn from the past and relearn shame and shamelessness to radically change their futures.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A powerfully imagined story of how very lucky we are to be alive at this moment in world history, when even sixty lousy years ago...within my lifetime!...options for women, for gay men, and for overall independence from patriarchy were as unimaginable as escape from the divine right of kings were three hundred years ago. While this story of a family's women moving from tradition to liberation is a carefully thought-out demonstration of hurdles failed, hurdles overcome, and hurdles only now hoving into view, it has a structural weakness. Most multiple-timeline stories have this same weakness: As we move from timeframe to timeframe, focusing a different woman in each, we lose forward momentum. It takes reading time to recover the investment made within each timeframe. Yasminah is indeed a constant, though not always foregrounded, presence; this helps with, but doesn't overcome my issue.

It mattered to me because the locations should have felt different in really evocative ways...Paris, Cairo, Bristol might as well be on different planets!...but I had to refocus my emotional temperature to a new main character. I'm not trying to be unkind or dissuasive; I really enjoyed this journey through the world's astonishingly rapid growth, and equally disheartening failure to learn lessons from past failures.

It's a very inexpensive Kindlebook. I'd tell any of my women readers, especially the sapphic ones, to get this all loaded up for solidarity's sake. Your family "Togetherness" will be that much easier to bear if you read about an earlier generation's struggles. We all need to know we're not alone, and part of that is knowing we're not the first either.

It is a fine piece of writing, and of story-telling; it *just* fails at greatness for this old man reader.