Year of the Elephant

I was exited to start this novel because I have really been enjoying our section on Middle Eastern women, but after I had finished the whole thing I just didn't feel that it was what I was hoping for.  I liked the main woman in the story; she had a good presence the novel.  In fact I admired all of the female characters of the novel for their dedication to their country and the strength that they showed protecting it.  I think that the novel had a lot to say politically and did a good job of doing this from a woman's point of view, but did not say enough to us about  Middle Eastern women in general, at least not things that we didn't already know.  

So the story that we experienced in this novel didn't particularly inspire me or make me ask any critical questions.  I think we've been experiencing this cycle in the class where we have different topics that we are supposed to be discussing but we always come back to the same things, and it makes it so that we exhaust the discussions of these books before we have even begun them.  This showed during our discussion of this book I think, we just seemed to fade out before the discussion could go anywhere.  I think the group did fine picking a novel that was interesting and a good portrayal of Middle Eastern women, I just don't think the novel was beneficial to out class at this point.  Had we read it earlier in the semester when much of this was still new information, we might have had a lot more to say about it.