Diana Abu-Jaber couldn't have imagined that we'd be reading her lush romance about lonely Iraqis by the light of Baghdad burning. Her publisher must be nervous about the political climate, but it's refreshing to see Iraqis outside "the axis of evil." In Crescent, they're struck by Cupid's arrows instead of Tomahawk missiles.

The story takes place in Los Angeles, but like the rest of us at the moment, every character is fixated on the Middle East. Arab students and professors congregate at Nadia's Caf�, a Lebanese restaurant where they can linger over foreign newspapers, argue about poetry, and drink coffee without being cautioned, "This Beverage Is Extremely Hot!"

"Everything about these young men seemed infinitely vulnerable and tender," Abu-Jaber writes, in one of many passages rendered more poignant by the current crisis. They're all consumed with loneliness, and they're all bashfully in love with the chef, Sirine. "She is so kind and gentle-voiced and her food is so good that the students cannot help themselves — they sit at the tables, leaning toward her."

She hasn't left West Hollywood for years, but from her Iraqi father, she learned how to conjure up the aromas of their lost desert home. Cookbooks have been her only travel guides. At 39, she knows far more about spices than politics. Orphaned as a little girl, she's been living with a kindly uncle who teaches in the Near Eastern Studies department at the university.

In his own gentle way, he encourages her to get married, and her distressingly slow progress in that direction is the subject of considerable discussion and analysis by the cafe staff. "She's always had more men in her life than she's known what to do with," the narrator explains, but somehow nothing ever comes of it. "She's never broken up with anyone, she just loses track of them."

Then, as must always happen when we've established that the woman is beyond reach, in walks The One. In this case, he's Han, a strikingly good-looking, moderately famous Near East scholar. But as soon as Sirine spots him, she "thinks spinster and hugs her elbows." This modest cafe chef would never dream of attracting the attention of a world-renowned intellectual who leaves devoted followers in his wake. But he's captivated by her, and before long, they're cooking together.

That's not a Monitoresque euphemism: They're actually cooking together. But one of the great pleasures of this sensitive novel is the way Abu-Jaber stirs these culinary metaphors. "The ingredients inside Han and herself called to each other," she writes, "like the way ingredients in a dish speak to each other, a taste of ginger vibrates with something like desire beside a bit of garlic, or the way a sip of wine might call to the olive oil in a dish." Indeed, when Abu-Jaber describes them making baklava together, it's a lot more erotic than what passes for love scenes in most modern novels.

With a little more zaniness, this could have been My Big Fat Iraqi Wedding, but Abu-Jaber prepares a more complex dish that's equal parts romantic comedy, political protest, fairy tale, and cultural analysis. As one of the cafe patrons notes, in Iraq "everything's sort of folded up and layered."

Indeed, the sweet humor that Crescent delivers so deftly is richly complemented by its exploration of loneliness.

With her characteristic melodrama, the cafe owner says, "The loneliness of the Arab is a terrible thing; it is all-consuming. It is already present like a little shadow under the heart when he lays his head on his mother's lap; it threatens to swallow him whole when he leaves his own country, even though he marries and travels and talks to friends 24 hours a day."

Abu-Jaber whips up a troubling argument about the way American efficiency aggravates that despair.

Sirine's uncle complains that in the US, "people just talk all day long on their phone, their computer, and no one ever lays eyes on each other."A patron in the cafe asks, "Why does no one in America recite poetry? They go to the coffeehouse and they just drink the coffee."

As Sirine gets closer to Han, she comes to realize how starved he is for the sustenance of his homeland. "I miss everything," he tells her in a moment of anguish, "absolutely everything. The fact of exile is bigger than everything else in my life. Leaving my country was like — I don't know — like part of my body was torn away. I have phantom pains from the loss of that part — I'm haunted by myself."

Slowly, she gathers pieces of his tragic history, his escape from Iraq and his family's ghastly fate under Saddam Hussein. Even knowing she can't fill that void, she makes an attempt, grasping after pieces of her father's Iraqi past, investigating Islam, and struggling to immerse herself in the political news she's always ignored.

Han assures her, "You are the place I want to be — you're the opposite of exile," but her uncle warns her that the cure for such loneliness is not so easy. "When we leave our home,"he says, "we fall in love with our sadness." Indeed, the demons pulling at Han are stronger than she feared, and the novel begins to veer away from its comic tone toward the horror of Saddam's rule and the ferocity of America's response.

At the same time, Abu-Jaber broadens her exploration of exile to include all the various ways we're bereft of home — by the death of parents, the separation from lovers, the hunger for lost childhood. Gradually, we come to see that every character in this story — Iraqi, American, and Arab-American — is banished by guilt, exiled to sadness by a sentence that can't be lifted by imperial decree or regime change.

Abu-Jaber captures this despair with exquisite care, but her heart belongs to romance, not tragedy. The allusions to Othello that waft through the story eventually give way to the uncle's outlandish fairy tale. This is a tough time to consider the artistic and culinary beauty of Iraq, but as one of the cafe patrons says, "Americans need to know about the big, dark, romantic soul of the Arab." Readers stuffed on headlines but still hungering for something relevant will enjoy this rich meal.

I liked everything in this book except the love story, which I thought was rather slow moving. I didn't fully understand why an Iraqi professor who is a famous translator, would fall instantly in love with a 40 year old half-Iraqi woman brought up in LA, who has spent her somewhat sheltered life with her uncle & the staff of the Lebanese cafe where she works as a chef.
But I think the love story was secondary to the different stories of loneliness. Whether they are exiled from a country or from family and one another, most of the characters in Crescent are lonely people searching for one another.
I like Abu-Jaber's writing style, which is warm & fluid. I like the way she entwined the uncle's stories, based in Arab myth & legend, into the story of Sirine & Han, along with the recipes & sensual descriptions of food & meals with family & friends. (I gotta try out some of these recipes!) The background characters, including the uncle, Um-Nadia, Nathan, Aziz, & Rana, were somewhat more interesting to me than the main characters. In fact I was positively impatient with Sirine at times. Snooping in your boyfriend's sock drawer, stalking him, flirting with his friends, & having public fits of jealousy, are not good girlfriend behaviors!
The sympathetic portrayal of Arab characters & the details of life in Iraq, both positive & negative, are very interesting & make this book well worth reading, along with its sensitive insights into the meaning of exile from one's country.
P.S. One of my favorite lines that really doesn't match the mood of the book - "I COMMAND YOU TO GIVE ME THE EGGPLANT!" I hope to use this sentence in a conversation, soon!

Sirine is a chef in a Middle Eastern restaurant in LA, the orphaned child of Red Cross worker parents killed in Africa, raised by an Iraqi uncle amongst poetry, literature, and fairy-tale like stories of family and possibly Omar Sharif.

Her tale is redolent with sumac, garlic, thyme and spotted olive oil and currants. There is a shifting POV that creates uneasiness to her story, that puts you offbalance when you read about her love affair with an Iraqi exile professor or when you listen to her uncle talk about the journey of her grandmother to find her missing so, the man who sells himself as a slave and then pretends to drown by throwing himself off the boat mid-sea and is stolen by a mermaid before he comes to the USA.

And it is also the tale of longing, love, and loss for a country, for an identity, as the cafe where Sirine works is mainly populated by emigres and students from Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt-- all the colors and flavors of what being an Arab might mean as they are irresistably drawn to the food and memories she creates.

There are also dark political undercurrents in the story that ultimately drag some of the main characters down, the legacy of the USA's embargo against Iraq and Saddam Hussein's rule.

At the end, you are left full, like you've eaten a veritable fragrant feast of emotions and history and tales, but also uncomfortable like you've taken in too much, too much of Sirine's friends caring for her, of the mysterious photographer Nathan's heartbreak, of the tragedy of loving a country and having to leave it in Sirine's lover, Han. This is a beautiful, difficult tale, and near the end, I got impatient with the author's pattern of just listing food ingredients as some kind of code for Sirine's mental state, but could not fault the overall emotionally deep affect.

I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it is a unique, multicultural take on the romance novel, in which issues of cultural identity, religion, and war are explored. But at its base, it is still a romance novel. And as with most romance novels, the female protagonist is uninteresting. All the focus is on the male protagonist and how great/smart/unique/brave/amazing he is while the female protagonist spends her time wondering why he would ever love her, which is a valid question as she is quite dull. I liked the mix of history, politics, and culture, but I was left flat by the lack of character development and the formulaic plot devices.

I'm a little conflicted on this one and I'm not sure why. (Okay, I know why in some ways because I just wanted to throw the book across the room and yell AARGH!) The writing style was a little different. It was as if each noun required a descriptor (a little annoying at first). After I got the rhythm of the writing it went a little quicker. At some times I felt really invested in the characters (the writer wrote a passage regarding the lead character, Sirina, that seemed to be written about me) but then at other times I felt like saying "I just cannot relate to these characters!". Although I think the author meant to display the cultural differences of the mid-eastern culture I found such strong similarities in the mid-eastern characters to people I've known. Another irritation factor me: it seems to have that prevalent theme I am finding in many cultural stories, American culture bad; any other culture besides American good. I know the American culture is not perfect and has it's flaws but...come on! There was a lot of writing about food, so if you're a cook this might be a good choice for you. The author included a few recipes in the back of the book for some of the foods mentioned. I thought that was an nice touch. See, even my review is conflicted!

This was a gorgeously written book celebrating food and Arabic cultures, love and friendship, war and creation, and the interconnectedness of people despite borders. I loved all the characters and found the descriptions to be lush and vivid and poetic. The ending was a bit fantastical but I still loved it.

Spoiler, I got bored with the fables Sirine's uncle is supposedly telling her at the beginning of each chapter, so I skipped them. I know they are supposed to somewhat mirror Han's own journey but also didn't care. Had zero effect on my enjoyment of the rest of the story. Not sorry.

This was a gorgeously written book. Abu-Jaber is a poet. Each line was beautifully lyrical. However, I felt myself a bit lulled in the middle and felt myself losing attention, because at times the book felt slow, especially with the interspersed fables, but I was riveted by the end, even if the last paragraph felt a little unrealistic. My heart ached for Sirine. I loved her, and her uncle, the meta quotes about storytelling, the sensuality of food and love, and the way she captures the torment and internal exile that occurs when a person physically leaves his country.

Some of my favorite lines:

“Habeebti, here is something you have to understand about stories: They can point you in the right direction but they can’t take you all the way there. Stories are crescent moons: they glimmer in the night sky, but they are most exquisite in their incomplete state. Because people crave the beauty of not-knowing, the excitement of suggestion, and the sweet tragedy of mystery. In other words, Habeebti, you must never tell everything” (384).

“She believes that at one time the elements inside Han and herself had called to each other, like the way ingredients in a dish speak to each other, a taste of ginger vibrated with something like desire beside a bit of garlic, or the way a sip of wine might call to the olive oil in a dish. Now she feels there is no one to resonate to her; that person is no longer on earth, and the earth has gotten much colder and much more unknowable” (359).

“She wonders sometimes if it’s a sort of flaw or lack in her— the inability to lose herself in someone else” (40).

“He found that if he listened closely enough that the words’ meaning would eventually reveal itself, glimmering through the sounds like fruit on dark branches” (249).

You have to read this book. I'm sure you hear this all the time, but honestly, you have to read this book. It was a class assignment in my college class Magical Realism and Women Studies. I liked the books I read in that class, but this is the only one I have kept and read and reread over the years. This book is truly magical. Sirine is unmarried, over 40 cook in a small middle eastern restaurant leading an uneventful life and living with her Uncle. An orphan, she lives in her own little bubble oblivious of everything including the adoring students of the local college. Her life changes when Han, a new professor comes into her life with dark secrets and a painful past. Now, if you know me, you know I don't do romance novels so let me reassure you this is not just a romance novel. It's a beautiful, complicated story that feels more like real life than you'd like. A bit of history, fantasy, magic, and cooking blend to make this truly something special. I thanked my professor for giving this story to me, honestly it has changed my view of story telling and what a good book can be. Read this book, it will leave you spell bound.

Sometimes I was swept away by the story telling, other times I was a little bored when I felt she spent too much time in a line that wasn't as interesting to me. I liked the interweaving of the fable with the lives of the characters.

"Habeebti, here is something you have to understand about stories: They can point you in the right direction but they can't take you all the way there. Stories are crescent moons: they glimmer in the night sky, but they are most exquisite in their incomplete state. Because people crave the beauty of not-knowing, the excitement of suggestion, and the sweet tragedy of mystery.
In other words, Habeebti, you must never tell everything"

Excellent comment on story telling.

As so often happens, when a character doesn't tell enough, or doesn't ask the right questions - when information is lacking - people make bad decisions (Sirine's night with Aziz), an it annoys me. Why does Han not tell her about the silk scarf, about his sister. When in a relationship is the time to tell all these things? When are you completely honest and open?
Nathan was all out creepy - the photographer who brought ruin in his wake. I knew he was intimately involved in Han's life when he appeared. Figured out what his relationship was with Han's sister.

Boring...couldn't finish the book.

A book that promises so much but consistently falls short - a book of great character outlines that never get filled in, a story that never really starts, goes anywhere or ends and a main character that is both dull and self-absorbed in a love story that you neither feel or care about (except that Han could do better). It's a shame with a book that for the most part has great writing and a rich and inviting setting (I definitely want to find my own Nadia's Cafe and the descriptions of cooking and food made my mouth water) - some of the best moments are the side characters (her uncle, Um-Nadia, and we can't forget King Babar) although many of them you're not quite sure why they're there.

Read this for the poetical descriptions of the LA landscape, Arabic cooking, and the ineffable loss of the immigrant who can't go back. Echoes of Othello. Sirine, the main character, seemed awfully wishy washy to me, kind of falling by accident into infidelity.