If you read fiction to escape, then you read literature to fall in love, and with this love collect for your heart the fallible gestures of human judgment that mark a life as you would know it. The Cry of the Dove creates a woman easy to fall in love with because her life encompasses the most human effort: to stake and bound an identity amid conditions that are powerfully imbalanced, but quietly, lovingly, individual.The novel is constructed with evocative language and a speech broken only out the narrator’s mouth, for Salma Ibrahim El-Musa, sometimes Sally Asher, is nothing if not honest in the cruelty of her self-image, her Bedouin roots never not on display for judgment by her adopted England. Like her speech, scenes of the narrative are spilled like a bag of stones, skipping from present to past, but orchestrated in a way to muse here on religion, here on birth, here on desire, here on loss.I don't know what to say that would express why I think this novel is so beautiful, just as I don't know how to encapsulate a life to make it tell as well as it feels. But I am in love with this complicated Salma, as much as with what she would hope to lightly carry as with how steadily she would march toward grace.
