TOO SOON

Multiple narratives track three Palestinian women from the Middle East to America and back again.

Arabella Hajjar is a New York theater director specializing in hip adaptations of Shakespeare and making a mess of her love life; she refuses to admit to longstanding feelings for her best male friend, who happens to be Jewish. Her Teta Zoya wants to set Arabella up with Aziz Habeeb, a doctor whose grandfather came from Zoya’s childhood village of Ramallah. Harvard-educated and hoping for bigger things in her directing career, Arabella is frustrated by her perception that people are more interested in ethnicity than art: “If you asked either to describe themselves in a word,” Arabella muses of two acquaintances, “they would have the same answer. Palestinian. Mine would be director.” So, when she’s given the opportunity to return to Palestine to direct a gender-swapped Hamlet, Arabella is apprehensive. Will her devotion to her work carry her through the complex political and emotional terrain of her return to Ramallah? And will Arabella finally open herself up to more than just theater? Playwright Shamieh, in the novel’s first part, toggles back and forth between Arabella in 2012 and Zoya, beginning just before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the family’s subsequent immigration to Michigan. Part Two interweaves Arabella’s arrival back in Palestine with her mother Naya’s childhood in 1970s Detroit and her adult life in California. Shamieh’s tone—present throughout, but strongest in Arabella’s sections—is confiding and chatty, a Carrie Bradshaw if Carrie had to worry about getting detained at Ben Gurion Airport by Israeli guards for eight hours. But this book isn’t fluffy: Its ethically complex characters carry heavy weights.

Shamieh refuses easy moral lessons, aiming for complexity and nuance with a light, voicey touch.