Despite being banned in Saudi Arabia for its biting critiques of upper-class Saudi society and the revelations it contains about the lives of young women in modern Riyadh, Alsanea’s 2005 novel was a bestseller across the Middle East and catapulted its author to international fame. The newly available English edition, translated in part by Alsanea herself, offers Western readers a rare glimpse into the Muslim world’s most impenetrable society. In a charmingly innocent twist on chick lit that leaves sex far out of the picture, the novel follows four twenty-something Saudi girls as they struggle to find love within the confines of the Kingdom’s strict social mores, relying more on horoscopes than on life experience in their quest to meet and marry their own versions of Mr. Right. But don’t be fooled by the novel’s whimsical style and fluffy subject matter—for these young women in the Saudi capital, there is much more than romance at stake.
Book Review by Anna Ziajka
