uuuugh i hated this book!!!!!! BUT before i start trashing it, i'll say that there is one thing i liked about it - the author's ability to give two completely different viewpoints and make the reader understand and empathize with them both. all i'll say about the plot is that it's about two people fighting for the ownership of a bungalow (that in itself should have stopped me from picking up this book - boringgggggg). i found myself rooting for each character at different times, for which i give credit to the author. but when i look at the book as whole, i absolutely hated it! first, the characters were put in the most absurd and unrealistic situations, the whole book was soooo unbelievable, i literally had to force myself to finish it. it was really a struggle for me to keep reading, i was so uninterested in the book, the only driving force was my curiosity to find out how the house dispute is resolved. needless to say, the end is so pathetic - but the whole book was a disappointment so i guess i shouldn't have gotten my hopes up. i am planning on seeing the movie tho, just to compare it to the book. as for recommendations, i emphatically DON'T recommend it to anyone, i found it too boring! but if you do read it or have read it before, i'd like to know what you thought.

Grim, and written with some of the most harrowing sex scenes ever, it's a predictable but tragic Modern Greek drama that unfolds before the reader like a horrific train wreck.

Behrani, Kathy and Lester are some of the most stubborn and human protagonists ever written in contemporary literature, but you feel for each of them with an unwavering empathy that forces you to question your own notions on the American Dream, and of race and class.

Behrani and his family walk away as the most sympathetic characters- but Kathy also haunts.

The 2003 film adaptation starring Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley is a beautiful and mournful adaptation of this modern classic of familial bonds and the ties we have to what we love.

“The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other.”
― Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog


This is the type of book that I would call a masterpiece. It also affected me so deeply that I’ve never been able to read it a second time. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

Although many people say this book is about a house it really doesn’t have all that much to do at the house in question. This book is about two people, flawed people to be sure, but People who are decent at heart although some of their actions may not appear that way.

These people love, they laugh, they cry and they hate. It is when The hate begins to overwhelm them that their lives catapult into catastrophe.

I guess this is the type of work one calls Shakespearean in nature. There are few books that affect me so deeply I can’t read them again.

That this book is great isn’t even a question in my mind. But I can still understand why it would not be for everyone. I think I’ve been able to write a bit of a review without using spoilers but I think this book is, as I said above a masterpiece. I still want to talk about the ending but.. I’ll skip that. Absolutely recommend it.

A woman with no discipline in her life has the use of her dead father's home. She moves there with her worthless husband. He leaves. She gets lots of official mail which she ignores. After all, she has no cares, no responsibilities, no nothing! She uses alcohol and drugs to excess. One day the sheriff's deputy comes to evict her. It's not her fault, of course, but she is so helpless the deputy feels sorry for her and helps her get a moving van, workers to pack up her stuff, and rent a storage bin to store everything.
As it happens, the next day, the house is auctioned off and a hard working immigrant buys it - hoping to fix it up and make money when selling it. The immigrant has been working two menial jobs and has a wife and son and well as a daughter he has just married off. He is Iranian and was in the army of the Shah and barely got out in time to save his life and his family's. He was once a rich man in Iran but is no longer wealthy and knows he can not continue back-breaking day work and then work all night at a convenience store. This book won many awards. The writing is beautiful, character descriptions are full, and the reader clearly knows where this is going. A selfish, spoiled American girl with no control over anything, a deputy sheriff who befriends her and who regards his wife as his sister and a former military man, well trained in the Iranian military and who is smart, well bred, polite. This is a clash. I guessed wrong about the ending but it will surprise you. A great book. We are using it in a book discussion group and it is ideal for that - spoiled children, refugees, wealth and then poverty, selfishness, family loyalty, etc.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The story line is a tragedy of epic proportions. Essentially a story with three main characters: Massoud Behrani, an expatriate from Iran, and Kathy Nicolo Lazaro, a “recovered” addict, and Lester Burdon, the deputy sheriff who tries to help Kathy get her house back. They are all fundamentally good people, but each has his/her flaws. The author tells the story in first person from two points of view, that of Colonel Behrani and that of Kathy Nicolo. Interestingly, Lester Burdon is presented in the third person; you never really know the deputy sheriff’s thoughts. You only see him in his interactions with the other characters. The book was a slow buildup to a devastating conclusion. It felt like a rising crescendo that you knew was going to end terribly. I really disliked how it ended, with no clear cut resolution. But it certainly held me in its grip.

I read it up to page 94. Started getting a little worried that this would turn out to be one of those books I might not want to actually read. There aren't many of those. I can handle suspense, gore, & even on very very very rare occasions I can even read a book with Zombies in it. Sometimes though, being a Daddy's girl, I just can't handle seeing (or reading) a certain type of character deal with certain types of issues. Anyway, I decided to read the last two pages just in case this thing had a happy ending. It doesn't. So, into the freezer with it!

Okay, I didn't actually finish this book because I grew tired of it. I found the characters of Kathy and her cop boyfriend trite and whiny. Kathy's situation in the book is really unfortunate, and I should feel sorry for her, but I really disliked her and therefore couldn't get into the book. All I wanted was for her to go away and the Behranis to have their house.

I understand that the author was trying to paint the immigrant experience, but again, I found that kind of trite. But, maybe that's because I have heard lots of true immigrant and refugee stories first-hand through my work.

When I just read the description of this book here on goodreads, I thought--that does sound interesting! But, in actually reading the book, the story wasn't that interesting. Ultimately, I stopped reading because I didn't like the characters enough to care what happened to them.

I loved this book. It was amazing. I never thought I would get so wrapped up in a story where the main character was actually a house (or should I say a "bungalow" as that is how it is mostly referred to in the book). In the first few chapters it seemed obvious who the good guy and who the bad guy in the story were, but I quickly found that line blurred and throughout the whole book I didn't know who to root for, I wanted them both to win. The reason I only gave this book four stars instead of the five it should have deserved was because this book WAS amazing... until it ended. It was possibly the worst, most unsatisfying ending I've ever read. I sat there staring at the book going "That's IT? That's how he's ending the book? Did I get a copy missing the last chapter?" The ending was not worthy of the rest of the book.

The House of Sand and Fog was a book that I had high expectations for. The reviews for this book have been above average, and (which I didn't find out until after I read) it was chosen for Oprah's Book Club. While I typically act high brow towards anything that is touted by the O, she has chosen to like some classics that I have, 'On the Road' being one of them. Though I don't know how the typical Oprah watcher could really get in to this... that is not the point.

Anyways, back to Dubas' book. I did appreciate his use of the Iranian colonel, a troubled man from a violent regime who is not mentally mature enough to see his own failings. Dubas' shaping of this character is actually poetic, though frustrating for a reader who learns that this negligence of responsibility is realistically in-defeatable in people who have committed human rights horrors. Behrani is never a hero to the reader, or to me, but if weighed against Kathy Nicolo, becomes the moral winner.

I was not at once convinced by Kathy. Her character is so unchanging, so immature, unable to learn from mistake after mistake that you can not like her. But how can she not learn? Behrani shows growth throughout the novel. If anything, Kathy shows a degeneration. I do appreciate the moments of internal struggle she shows, but it is hardly enough to redeem her.

I don't think Dumas took much of a leap with the character development, or the plot development. From the rave reviews I've heard of this book, I was expecting much better. To echo a post I read on GoodReads, this is the equivalent of a Beach Read that doesn't need to be brought to the beach. Little thought needed, easy to flip through, doesn't affect reader. Blah.

I read another review on here before I read the book, and the person said that the book was "boring" because this was just two people fighting over a "house."

Actually, it's much more than that, and I thought the house served as a symbol for each person involved. This story gave the reader an inside look into an immigrant family, showing that they are "just like us," fighting for a place in this sometimes disgusting country. The house for Mr. Behrani served as a symbol of "making it" in America. He was working two jobs but lying to his family about the type of work he was doing. He had come from a place where he had been considered a high rank, and I think he felt that he was failing his family and this house was his chance to make things better. For Kathy, I thought the house was the only stable thing in her life - her husband had left her, she fell back into drinking, etc. Although she kept saying it was her dad's house and he had left it to her and her brother, I think she was more worried about her brother seeing her as the failure he'd always seen her as.

The intensity, passion, and chemistry of Les and Kathy's relationship was there (for me) from the paragraph they met and carried through to the very last page. (I couldn't quite figure out over what time span this book took place but it wasn't a very long period of time. Was it like a week or a little more?)

I had no idea that the book was going to take the turn that it did. At first I was upset about it, but then I realized it was the only way it could end. No one got the house. No one had a happy ending. I was left with a few questions, but they probably couldn't have been answered anyway.

I cannot remember the last time I loathed a book as much as I loathed House of Sand and Fog. I wanted to like it. It seems that everyone in the world had recommended it. But from the first pages I sense where the whole massive trainwreck was heading. And I did not want to be dragged along. However, because I have a compulsion to finish every book I start, I read the whole thing, hating it more with every page. I found the characters contemptible caricatures. The Iranians to me felt like one-dimensional money and class-obsessed materialists, making it impossible to relate to them. Were I Iranian, I would be miffed at being portrayed as such shallow, greedy, narcissists. And I am so, SO tired of reading about addicts. Why, why must every author in the world obsess about addicts? They are so boring! I am weary of watching them spiral downward. I just don't want to go along for the ride anymore. I mean, the minute you're introduced to an addict in a book, you are just waiting for that person to slip up and be consumed again, which inevitably happens. Reading this book was just watching one bad decision after the next, with no respite, no enlightenment, no moments of grace or insight. One might as well sit and watch a pile-up on the highway, or a domestic dispute spin out of control.

A very very sad and depressing book. Everything about this book is sad. Even the movie is sad. But I have to admit, the writing is good.

3 stars