Review | Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World by Katherine Zoepf

Rating: 2.5/5 Stars

Genre: Political/Feminist Nonfiction

Published: January 12th 2016

Goodreads Summary:

"For more than a decade, Katherine Zoepf has lived in or traveled throughout the Arab world, reporting on the lives of women, whose role in the region has never been more in flux. Only a generation ago, female adolescence as we know it in the West did not exist in the Middle East. There were only children and married women. Today, young Arab women outnumber men in universities, and a few are beginning to face down religious and social tradition in order to live independently, to delay marriage, and to pursue professional goals. Hundreds of thousands of devout girls and women are attending Qur’anic schools—and using the training to argue for greater rights and freedoms from an Islamic perspective. And, in 2011, young women helped to lead antigovernment protests in the Arab Spring. But their voices have not been heard. Their stories have not been told.

In Syria, before its civil war, she documents a complex society in the midst of soul-searching about its place in the world and about the role of women. In Lebanon, she documents a country that on the surface is freer than other Arab nations but whose women must balance extreme standards of self-presentation with Islamic codes of virtue. In Abu Dhabi, Zoepf reports on a generation of Arab women who’ve found freedom in work outside the home. In Saudi Arabia, she chronicles driving protests and women entering the retail industry for the first time. In the aftermath of Tahrir Square, she examines the crucial role of women in Egypt's popular uprising.

Deeply informed, heartfelt, and urgent,Excellent Daughters brings us a new understanding of the changing Arab societies—from 9/11 to Tahrir Square to the rise of ISIS—and gives voice to the remarkable women at the forefront of this change."

Review:

Before I start the review, I'd like to inform you all that I found a way to avoid that awkward double colon problem that happened with my Quarantine: Stories review, that way being to not have a colon after the word 'Review' in my title. Not a groundbreaking discovery but I'd thought I'd share why my titles will look different from now on.

Now, Excellent Daughters is by no means a terrible book. It shows that Katherine Zoepf has had a career in writing for a long while. The real problem with it is that it misrepresents itself.

Excellent Daughters is not really about the lives of young Arab women who are changing the East's perspective on women's rights; instead, it's about Zoepf and her travels around the Arab world, vaguely telling the stories of people she met while she was employed as a stringer. It all comes off as a little naive. She writes as though she's too afraid to make any judgments  on the culture, even in the face of horrific civil rights violations like brutal honor killings and humiliating virginity tests.

It is also rife with run-on sentences. I wish I could speak to her editor, to ask why they didn't say anything to her. There were some sentences that were so long that they took up an entire paragraph. It was ridiculous and easily avoidable. If you think you would run out of breath speaking the sentence out loud, that's a good indication that you should trim it down. This might sound nit-picky but it took away from the reading experience.

Despite all of this, I was happy to learn about the Arab World, something far removed from the United States. Zoepf makes a point in the beginning of the book that because of all of the terrible things going on between the West and the Middle East, that we are eager to learn about this culture that's so different from ours that we're clashing with; it's similar to how interest in Russia increased during the Cold War, as she mentioned. She went into detail on the intricacies of the manners and laws that govern Islam and the Arab nation as well.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend this book unless someone is interested in learning about the Arabian peninsula and its surrounding countries.