This was a solid and enjoyable story of a young woman's moral education in Saudi Arabia in 1967. The swirl of civil rights type issues and the cultural backdrop, as well as the artistic growth of the narrator makes me think of this like a "Saudi Arabian The Help," but I'll admit I know The Help more as a cultural phenom than as a book or movie.

I found this to be a well-plotted, well-written book. The writing in the "difficult" first chapter is lyric and well-suited to the purpose of helping to set up the story, and then recedes as we get into more narrative sections and the writing is less showy. Ideas swirl and coalesce and for the most part come together in satisfying ways. It's good stuff, and Barnes is mostly successful at keeping her narrator close to the center of the action at the climax, even though by her gender she is necessarily a bit off the center.

There are moments of some overreach, I thought: some of the conversations at the end, like the conversation between the narrator and Yash about women, arabs, and colonial subjects is maybe a little on the nose, and Abdullah's family moving the tent near the climax was a little convenient. I didn't think so much of the epilogue, either. But there was an awful lot in this book that I really liked.