Banat Al Riyad

Banat Al Riyad is the first novel for the Saudi femal writer Ragaa Al Sane3. Apart from the problems that the book tackles and exposes while taking us deep into the lives of four Saudi young women on their first steps in adult life and as a reader I really consider this book as a typical modern 21st Century novel, written in the form of weekly mails as each chapter is an email sent by the female writer every Friday. Each chapter starts the way an email starts with the address and subject...etc so it really feels like you're reading an email. The writer begins each mail with quotes, poems, verses from the Koran, hadeeth and sometimes Do3aa. The mails are like TV series where the 4 stories all run in parallel exposing the differences in characters, events, reactions but still they all share the same feelings and problems. The narrating style of the writer is so catching with its simple free flowing sentences, the dialogues are so real and the way she wrote English sentences in Arabic was really innovative. The novel as a whole reminds me of the works of Ehssan Abdelkoddous, the very famous Egyptian writer whose works were very famous in bookstores, cinemas and TV from the sixties till now. The similarity is mainly in the simplicity of the narrating style, the focus on women and their relations with men and reactions to such relations in addition to the oppression they face in our societies. One last word, the novel is a must read and especially for those who liked The Yaakoubian building, the novel, they will find Banat Al Riyad somehow similar in style although the content is very much different. I guess we will see this work soon on TV in Ramadan