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flogigyahoo's review
4.0
Jean McNeil is a really talented writer. She has the ability to bring a country to life--in this case an unnamed country in Africa--by describing the fauna, the birds, the wind, the heat, in seemingly effortless lyrical prose, that when she turns to the story itself one feels as if one has awakened from a nap.
Rebecca, a doctor working in an area being attacked by radical Islamists is not just a doctor and when she is attacked she goes to visit her nearby family at The Dhow House-- a mansion named after the boats plying the Indian Ocean-- so she can recuperate with her aunt Julia, her uncle, a business man and hardly around, and her younger cousins, Storm and Lucy. Her relationship with each of these family members is strange and not always clear. One never really feels close to any of them. They are types. Bill: white farmer; Julia: rich bitch; Storm: strong and silent. We meet Lucy 2 chapters after she arrives home. Rebecca herself has some imortant issues and we never feel comfortable with this family. But it is the absolutely beautiful descriptions of Africa, and the writing that keeps one reading and reading. I loved it and want to read more by Jean McNeil.
Rebecca, a doctor working in an area being attacked by radical Islamists is not just a doctor and when she is attacked she goes to visit her nearby family at The Dhow House-- a mansion named after the boats plying the Indian Ocean-- so she can recuperate with her aunt Julia, her uncle, a business man and hardly around, and her younger cousins, Storm and Lucy. Her relationship with each of these family members is strange and not always clear. One never really feels close to any of them. They are types. Bill: white farmer; Julia: rich bitch; Storm: strong and silent. We meet Lucy 2 chapters after she arrives home. Rebecca herself has some imortant issues and we never feel comfortable with this family. But it is the absolutely beautiful descriptions of Africa, and the writing that keeps one reading and reading. I loved it and want to read more by Jean McNeil.
near34212's review
3.0
Visit https://www.sameerreads.wordpress.com for more of my reviews!
SOURCE
eARC provided by Netgalley and Legend Press in exchange for an honest review.
REVIEW
To be honest, I picked up this book randomly from the Netgalley Catalog. But, I am glad that I did.
The Dhow House is a novel which encompasses a wide range of themes like terrorism and many other current scenarios which are being overlooked.
The story revolves around Rebecca Laurelson, an English doctor , who is forced to leave her post in an East African field hospital. She then leaves for her aunt’s house and is taken into the family as their own. But the gilded lives of her aunt Julia’s family and their fellow white Africans on the coast are under threat – Islamist terror attacks are on the rise and Rebecca knows more about this violence than she is prepared to divulge.
I had the privilege of contacting the author. I asked her for the reason she named each part of the book after a bird. Here is her reply:
'Each section has the name of a bird which then appears in the narrative. The bird itself is symbolic - Amani sunbird symbolises sunniness, innocence, where as the Augur buzzard symbolises tidings of the future - to augur is to look into the future. All these birds are those you actually find in the landscape of the novel - coastal and upland east Africa. The novel is very much about the natural world and its effect on the human psyche.'
MY THOUGHTS
The story was a bit slow sometimes and I felt that I needed a break.
The attention to detail was really great. The way the author described the pied birds, the baleful snakes and the vectors of the jungle was beautiful.
Each part in the book is named after an animal which resembles the story that was going to happen.
The author handled a theme where she was talking about how whites in Africa are not being given an equal chance. I clearly don’t agree with this because many blacks in Africa are still suffering from racism and it is important that they are getting an equal fighting chance everywhere.
I give the book 3 and a half stars!
SOURCE
eARC provided by Netgalley and Legend Press in exchange for an honest review.
REVIEW
To be honest, I picked up this book randomly from the Netgalley Catalog. But, I am glad that I did.
The Dhow House is a novel which encompasses a wide range of themes like terrorism and many other current scenarios which are being overlooked.
The story revolves around Rebecca Laurelson, an English doctor , who is forced to leave her post in an East African field hospital. She then leaves for her aunt’s house and is taken into the family as their own. But the gilded lives of her aunt Julia’s family and their fellow white Africans on the coast are under threat – Islamist terror attacks are on the rise and Rebecca knows more about this violence than she is prepared to divulge.
I had the privilege of contacting the author. I asked her for the reason she named each part of the book after a bird. Here is her reply:
'Each section has the name of a bird which then appears in the narrative. The bird itself is symbolic - Amani sunbird symbolises sunniness, innocence, where as the Augur buzzard symbolises tidings of the future - to augur is to look into the future. All these birds are those you actually find in the landscape of the novel - coastal and upland east Africa. The novel is very much about the natural world and its effect on the human psyche.'
MY THOUGHTS
The story was a bit slow sometimes and I felt that I needed a break.
The attention to detail was really great. The way the author described the pied birds, the baleful snakes and the vectors of the jungle was beautiful.
Each part in the book is named after an animal which resembles the story that was going to happen.
The author handled a theme where she was talking about how whites in Africa are not being given an equal chance. I clearly don’t agree with this because many blacks in Africa are still suffering from racism and it is important that they are getting an equal fighting chance everywhere.
I give the book 3 and a half stars!
balancinghistorybooks's review against another edition
2.0
Of Jean McNeil's The Dhow House, Giles Foden writes 'This exotic novel handles large themes with assurance, tact and knowledge'. The Observer have deemed her debut novel, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, 'almost overwhelmingly vivid', and the Times Literary Supplement herald it 'striking for its vigour, wit and thoughtfulness'. Its own blurb states that The Dhow House is a 'seductive, fast-paced tale of lust, power and corruption', as well as 'forbidden love in a dark time'. Whilst I am not familiar with her first novel, upon reading The Dhow House, McNeil's work seems to me on this basis to be inconsistent; whilst the settings she describes are undoubtedly vivid, the characters and prose felt rather flat to me.
Rebecca Laurelson is the protagonist of The Dhow House. She goes to live at her relatively unknown aunt's house near Kilindoni in Tanzania, after being forced to leave her job post in an East African field hospital. For whites, the African coast holds many dangers, the ultimate threat that of Islamist terrorism. On the face of it, as it deals with such poignant themes as terror attacks, one would expect the novel to be both insightful and important. Such elements, however, felt overshadowed by the element of love story here. In what feels to me like a massive cliche, Rebecca soon falls in love with her young cousin, Storm. The very description which McNeil offers of him is banal: 'His eyes were the depthless blue of swimming pools'. How could they possibly be anything else? The way in which Rebecca's feelings for him are expressed follow a similarly cringeworthy pattern: 'As she'd taken his hand she'd felt an odd buzzing in the pit of her stomach'.
Oddly, McNeil's scenic depictions are far more striking, and hold some of the vividness which other reviewers have picked up on in her earlier work. Sentences such as 'A flare of sun over a blood ocean' and 'The sun rises like a proximate planet, a burning ceramic moon' hold such power, and even hover around the bounds of originality. McNeil's use of cultural details, both historical and contemporary, help to ease the setting into life. She is evidently very familiar with African weather patterns and geography, and renders every backdrop into which her characters step realistic. The novel is a visual one, but other senses have almost been forgotten in the foregrounding of places.
The use of two narrative perspectives - the first and third person - worked well here. The plot, however, is rather drawn out in places. Details which are included are sometimes repetitive or superfluous, and I must admit that I became a little frustrated with the inclusion of such unnecessary details.
McNeil's strength definitely lies within her descriptive power; it is just a shame that the rest of the book falls flat and imbalanced in comparison. The Dhow House feels accurate in terms of place, but the scenery feels more realistic than those who people it. The whole never really came to life for me. There was so much potential here, and had the plot been tighter, I probably would have enjoyed it far more. There are also quite a few issues with consistency which I noticed throughout, particularly with regard to grammar and tenses. The relatively poor editing does let the whole down considerably, as any degree of fluency is lost in those places which would have benefitted from it the most.
Rebecca Laurelson is the protagonist of The Dhow House. She goes to live at her relatively unknown aunt's house near Kilindoni in Tanzania, after being forced to leave her job post in an East African field hospital. For whites, the African coast holds many dangers, the ultimate threat that of Islamist terrorism. On the face of it, as it deals with such poignant themes as terror attacks, one would expect the novel to be both insightful and important. Such elements, however, felt overshadowed by the element of love story here. In what feels to me like a massive cliche, Rebecca soon falls in love with her young cousin, Storm. The very description which McNeil offers of him is banal: 'His eyes were the depthless blue of swimming pools'. How could they possibly be anything else? The way in which Rebecca's feelings for him are expressed follow a similarly cringeworthy pattern: 'As she'd taken his hand she'd felt an odd buzzing in the pit of her stomach'.
Oddly, McNeil's scenic depictions are far more striking, and hold some of the vividness which other reviewers have picked up on in her earlier work. Sentences such as 'A flare of sun over a blood ocean' and 'The sun rises like a proximate planet, a burning ceramic moon' hold such power, and even hover around the bounds of originality. McNeil's use of cultural details, both historical and contemporary, help to ease the setting into life. She is evidently very familiar with African weather patterns and geography, and renders every backdrop into which her characters step realistic. The novel is a visual one, but other senses have almost been forgotten in the foregrounding of places.
The use of two narrative perspectives - the first and third person - worked well here. The plot, however, is rather drawn out in places. Details which are included are sometimes repetitive or superfluous, and I must admit that I became a little frustrated with the inclusion of such unnecessary details.
McNeil's strength definitely lies within her descriptive power; it is just a shame that the rest of the book falls flat and imbalanced in comparison. The Dhow House feels accurate in terms of place, but the scenery feels more realistic than those who people it. The whole never really came to life for me. There was so much potential here, and had the plot been tighter, I probably would have enjoyed it far more. There are also quite a few issues with consistency which I noticed throughout, particularly with regard to grammar and tenses. The relatively poor editing does let the whole down considerably, as any degree of fluency is lost in those places which would have benefitted from it the most.
tonstantweader's review against another edition
3.0
Rebecca Laurelton is a relief doctor working at the epicenter of an intense civil war in East Africa who clearly endured a violent, traumatic incident and needed some respite. She takes the opportunity to become acquainted with her aunt Julia and her family when Julia invites her to stay at her fabulous estate called The Dhow House, which gave its name to the title of Jean McNeil’s book. It turns out, though, that Rebecca is more than she seems, but then so is her family.
Rebecca’s mother was estranged from her sister Julia, so Rebecca barely knows her. She had never met, Julia’s husband Bill, or her adult children Lucy and Storm. Bill is a farmer cum financier, Lucy is a college student, Storm seems to be drifting between high school and college uncertain what to do, and Julia is a somewhat shallow socialite. They are very wealthy, sheltered behind their gates even though they have lost their farms. But then, as Rebecca’s American friend notes, “There are fortunes to be made off poor people.” They seem very much of the Kenyan Happy Valley type, though transplanted to a coastal resort settlement on the coast of the Indian Ocean in an anonymous African country that is likely Kenya. Rebecca’s work in the north would then be in Somalia, and the paramilitary group Al-Nur would be Al-Shabaab.
The conflict is inching closer to the Dhow House by the day. There is rising tensions in the community, increasing incidents of violence and murder that are reported. Rebecca is attuned to this, because we learn she is more than a doctor, she is also an intelligence asset, reporting what she see to British intelligence. So The Dhow House is rich with all sorts of action adventure espionage elements, but that’s not what it is about.
Rebecca falls in love with her cousin Storm who is fifteen years younger than her. He’s eighteen, physically beautiful, athletic, someone who is enjoying life surfing, going to parties, and trying to figure out what he is going to do. All of them know that they should leave Africa, but in England they would be ordinary people. In Africa they are epic. Yes, this is Happy Valley.
The Dhow House is a strange and unsettling book. McNeil is a beautiful writer. I cannot tell you how many times I stopped to admire an expertly crafted sentence rich with imagery and original, singular metaphors that took my breath away. It’s not just that her metaphors were so very fresh, but they were perfectly apt.
McNeil is writing about the quandary of the white Africans, who have lost their power in an Africa for Africans. This family recognizes that they are mediocre people who are special only because they are in Africa, clinging like the ghosts who won’t leave their home after their time has gone. I wonder why McNeil wrote about these uninteresting people when from her book, it’s clear she is more interested in people like Aisha and Ali than in people like Julia and Bill.
So why didn’t I love it? This is not the kind of book McNeil should be writing. Here is a book full of violence and war and yet I felt not one moment of jeopardy, of tension or fear. There is this all-consuming passion between Rebecca and Storm, and yet I could never figure out why. I really did not care about the plot or the people at all. They were ghosts messing about and ruining what should have been a beautiful book about the birds and landscapes of this coast. The most compelling and interesting character in the book was Aisha, a woman who came to the medical camp.
I confess I did not like Rebecca. She is a ruiner, reckless with other people’s lives. As a doctor with a relief agency, she had no business acting as a spy. That brought jeopardy to her fellow relief workers. As an adult, a thirty-something woman, she had no business having an affair with her eighteen year-old cousin, no matter how reciprocal the attraction. Likewise, she had no business not warning her family that she had seen a leader of Al-Nur who warned her there would be an attack. She repeatedly put others in jeopardy without thought, yet never once did I feel as though she were in real jeopardy, not even when the trauma that happened to her is fully revealed. Perhaps because she withholds herself so completely from life, I can’t care enough to feel her at risk.
The narrative jumped quite a bit and not always with clarity. I would be reading into the third, fourth, or fifth page of a chapter before realizing that there was a jump back in time. This is in part because McNeil is a very oblique writer, avoiding any sort of straightforward narrative. She has internalized the “show, don’t tell” doctrine to the point of obscurantism. I was a quarter into this book and lamenting to my best friend, “I have no idea what this book is about.”
The thing is, I love her prose. When she is writing about birds, about the sky, the water, the trees, I swoon. She should write books like Diane Ackerman, naturalist essays about the world because she sees the world in magical ways.
I received an e-galley from the publisher after entering (and losing) a drawing through Shelf Awareness.
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/04/26/9781770413498/
Rebecca’s mother was estranged from her sister Julia, so Rebecca barely knows her. She had never met, Julia’s husband Bill, or her adult children Lucy and Storm. Bill is a farmer cum financier, Lucy is a college student, Storm seems to be drifting between high school and college uncertain what to do, and Julia is a somewhat shallow socialite. They are very wealthy, sheltered behind their gates even though they have lost their farms. But then, as Rebecca’s American friend notes, “There are fortunes to be made off poor people.” They seem very much of the Kenyan Happy Valley type, though transplanted to a coastal resort settlement on the coast of the Indian Ocean in an anonymous African country that is likely Kenya. Rebecca’s work in the north would then be in Somalia, and the paramilitary group Al-Nur would be Al-Shabaab.
The conflict is inching closer to the Dhow House by the day. There is rising tensions in the community, increasing incidents of violence and murder that are reported. Rebecca is attuned to this, because we learn she is more than a doctor, she is also an intelligence asset, reporting what she see to British intelligence. So The Dhow House is rich with all sorts of action adventure espionage elements, but that’s not what it is about.
Rebecca falls in love with her cousin Storm who is fifteen years younger than her. He’s eighteen, physically beautiful, athletic, someone who is enjoying life surfing, going to parties, and trying to figure out what he is going to do. All of them know that they should leave Africa, but in England they would be ordinary people. In Africa they are epic. Yes, this is Happy Valley.
The Dhow House is a strange and unsettling book. McNeil is a beautiful writer. I cannot tell you how many times I stopped to admire an expertly crafted sentence rich with imagery and original, singular metaphors that took my breath away. It’s not just that her metaphors were so very fresh, but they were perfectly apt.
McNeil is writing about the quandary of the white Africans, who have lost their power in an Africa for Africans. This family recognizes that they are mediocre people who are special only because they are in Africa, clinging like the ghosts who won’t leave their home after their time has gone. I wonder why McNeil wrote about these uninteresting people when from her book, it’s clear she is more interested in people like Aisha and Ali than in people like Julia and Bill.
So why didn’t I love it? This is not the kind of book McNeil should be writing. Here is a book full of violence and war and yet I felt not one moment of jeopardy, of tension or fear. There is this all-consuming passion between Rebecca and Storm, and yet I could never figure out why. I really did not care about the plot or the people at all. They were ghosts messing about and ruining what should have been a beautiful book about the birds and landscapes of this coast. The most compelling and interesting character in the book was Aisha, a woman who came to the medical camp.
I confess I did not like Rebecca. She is a ruiner, reckless with other people’s lives. As a doctor with a relief agency, she had no business acting as a spy. That brought jeopardy to her fellow relief workers. As an adult, a thirty-something woman, she had no business having an affair with her eighteen year-old cousin, no matter how reciprocal the attraction. Likewise, she had no business not warning her family that she had seen a leader of Al-Nur who warned her there would be an attack. She repeatedly put others in jeopardy without thought, yet never once did I feel as though she were in real jeopardy, not even when the trauma that happened to her is fully revealed. Perhaps because she withholds herself so completely from life, I can’t care enough to feel her at risk.
The narrative jumped quite a bit and not always with clarity. I would be reading into the third, fourth, or fifth page of a chapter before realizing that there was a jump back in time. This is in part because McNeil is a very oblique writer, avoiding any sort of straightforward narrative. She has internalized the “show, don’t tell” doctrine to the point of obscurantism. I was a quarter into this book and lamenting to my best friend, “I have no idea what this book is about.”
The thing is, I love her prose. When she is writing about birds, about the sky, the water, the trees, I swoon. She should write books like Diane Ackerman, naturalist essays about the world because she sees the world in magical ways.
I received an e-galley from the publisher after entering (and losing) a drawing through Shelf Awareness.
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/04/26/9781770413498/
thedreaminghare's review against another edition
1.0
DNF.
Though I've enjoyed previous Legend Press titles, this one was not up my alley.
Though I've enjoyed previous Legend Press titles, this one was not up my alley.
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