BIG LITTLE ADVENTURES IN YEMEN

 

LITTLE ADVENTURES IN YEMEN

        NOVEL   -A REVIEW 

Fighting for love is ever challenging under the highest stakes, as is the case of this first novel by Franca Sol, an invitation to enter our little life drama … It can be uplifted with this novel. It doesn’t take more than 20 pages to win you over. In five short spans you will read its growing dangers and uncanny endings. Little can you guess the plots behind our Mr Local, or a fugitive mercenary, two of the miscarried love-hunts in the novel. … two of her imperfect flirts.

The female expat delivers what she promises: rich little misadventures living in near civil wartime romantic drama narrative, a hormonal conflict zone. The protagonist has given up caring about right and wrong, and her only loyalty is to the heart winning side. She approaches everything with wit.

You are filled with a long list of spicey supporting cast that carry out surprises and misadventures. So, the first guest appearance in the novel, the couchsurfer, (an alter-ego for you, reader?) is pampered and  he ends up with ‘a big smile and a good impression of the country’… and so are we.  That brings us to the next in the cast: the hate-to-love rivalry from the owners of the drinking joints which make the long hours of the night bearable –as the daylight humanitarian work does remain in faded terms.  

Last but not least among the supporting cast, her flatmates, Bilma and Anna: many of the novel's best lines are theirs. Two moments I treasured: that pool party in the mafraj…memorable!  And kissing Mama Coco, the curvy Somali dancer with a honey heart.

Perhaps another character is the country itself. The fiction is set in the lands of Yemen [from the capital, Sana’a, to the Ma’rib mountain range to the Socotra fab island in the Indian ocean]. We readers become a bit worried for her on her way out at the last chapter, yet we are also smiling readers with a chorus of cries of 'good luck’…, looking at a welcoming next treat in her new venture.... in Mossul in 2021?

The main asset of the book is the interposition of cultural sketches opening an ample window where we enter the local society from a privileged viewpoint, from hospital jabs to prostitution rackets. Sarah Aljoumari, a young Yemeni illustrator and a blogger, enhances the cultural sketch chapters with her delightful art. It is a great contribution that gives a real feel of her country. 

https://www.instagram.com/sarahjamjam/ 

The main spark in the text is that it takes you away to your own imagination, to your own visited places from Aberdeen to Zaragoza. And as the main character makes us ponder, somehow: …think about it for a minute. Isn’t it like that everywhere? Yes you are completely right, it is.

FOR THE CATALAN REVIEW.... Go to this  link