ALU Summer Book Club: What to Read After Where the Jasmine Blooms

If you gravitated toward the characters of Where the Jasmine Blooms…

…try My Thievery of the People by Leila Marshy (Baraka Books)

From the right-place, wrong-time romance between Yasmine and Ziyad, to the everyday heroism of Reem holding her family together after countless tragedies, the characters in Where the Jasmine Blooms show their humanity at every turn of the page. Likewise for these collected stories from Palestinian-Newfoundland writer Leila Marshy, ones that show everyday people in locations near and far stepping up to defy systems of power.

If the romance and family politics were your favourite part…

…try The Allspice Bath by Sonia Saikaley (Inanna Publications)

If you were on the edge of your seat during the family dinner scene where Yasmine first realizes Ziyad might not be entirely who he seems, you’ll love Sonia Saikaley’s The Allspice Bath. Adele is the rebellious fourth daughter of a Lebanese-Canadian family. When she joins them on a trip to Lebanon and meets a handsome, intelligent suitor, was their chance meeting actually a setup?

If you were moved by the plight of refugees in the Middle East…

…try The Clothesline Swing by Danny Ramadan (Nightwood Editions)

The passages in Where the Jasmine Blooms where the characters are trying to evade Israeli bombing while attempting a rescue in a Palestinian refugee camp are some of the most harrowing, and will stick with readers for a long time. If these compelled you to take a closer look at the difficulties refugees face in the Middle East and around the world, The Clothesline Swing, Danny Ramadan’s novel about two Syrian men – lovers and refugees – fleeing for Lebanon, then Turkey, then Egypt, and finally, Canada, after the Arab Spring.

If you want to understand more about how we got here…

…try The Bells of Memory: A Palestinian Boyhood in Jerusalem by Issa J. Boullata (Linda Leith Publishing)

One thing that becomes clear while reading Where the Jasmine Blooms is the cyclical nature of the continued conflict and persecution of Palestinian people. The novel is set in 2006, but the passages about conflict ring true today, and the characters recall previous times in their living memory and before where other outbreaks of war and violence have occured. The late writer Issa Boullata’s memoir The Bells of Memory recall his childhood in the 1930s and 1940s, when Palestine was under the British Mandate, up until the Al-Nakba of 1948, when countless Palestinian families were forcibly displaced from their homes to make way for new residents of Israel.