Hope and laughter animate Betty Shamieh’s debut, Too Soon, which revolves around three generations impacted by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For a subject so weighty, the novel feels surprisingly effervescent thanks to the witty and resolute women who make up the three main characters—Zoya, Naya and the central protagonist, Arabella.
Stretching from 1948 to 2012, the story takes us from Jaffa to New York. We follow Zoya, a mother of nine, who is forced to abandon her seaside villa to start again as a refugee in Michigan; Naya, Zoya’s youngest daughter, who grows up in the changing Detroit of the ’60s and ’70s; and Arabella, Naya’s outspoken daughter, a Yale graduate who, at 35, has achieved a version of the American dream as a theater director in New York City. These three women, each shaped by their times, have more in common than they would like to admit.
Too Soon begins in New York in 2012 with Arabella, who has just been invited by the Royal Court Theatre of England to direct Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the West Bank. Arabella is lukewarm about the opportunity, but she decides to go for it after her grandmother Zoya sets her up with a boy named Aziz, who is volunteering as a medic on the Gaza border.
In her great-grandfather’s one-room house in Ramallah, Arabella confronts her family’s history and her place in it, while dating Aziz and directing her radical gender-swapped production of Hamlet. Dispersed among Arabella’s angsty chapters are chapters telling Zoya’s and Naya’s stories, recounting their memories of girlhood, lost love, marriage and motherhood. Together, they spin a resonating tale of hope’s potential to survive through terrible atrocity.
Shamieh is a Palestinian American writer and playwright who has written 15 plays, and is a founder of The Semitic Root, an Arab and Jewish American theater collective. In her first novel, she has crafted a page-turner that is not only funny and of its time, but also steeped in history, questioning the age-old adage that time heals all wounds.
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