An American woman who was born of Iraqi parents meets a man from Iraq and falls in love (madly and passionately) only he is torn in staying in America and going back to Iraq where he would probably be killed. You learn about the Arab community in this book and as she is a chef in a restaurant, I loved the description of her cooking and the food!

This book was highly recommended and rated well, but I found the main character to be totally uninteresting. Well, she liked to cook, but that seemed to be all. She cooked lamb ... a lot. If you like reading about uninteresting people cooking lamb, read this book. Some other stuff happened too, but it wasn't interesting either.

This novel is so bad. It's problematic and troubling in so many ways from orientalist stereotypes to subtle anti-blackness. The author claims an Arab identity despite being half-white and she does nothing to acknowledge her whiteness in the novel or her privileges; it is a novel more concerned with reckoning with the author's own white guilt than portraying an accurate or at least respectable depiction of hybrid identities, especially Arab hybrid identities. It's one of those texts presented as progressive and politically correct but if anything it is insulting to Arabs in so many ways. Also, Crescent supposed to be a rewrite of Othello (with gestures to the Homeric epics, and the Arabian Nights) but does it so badly, it's either very on the nose or so obscure that it ceases being an allusion. And on top of that, it's terribly written. Like the writing is objectively bad. Really bad.

Interesting commments

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It is a lyrical tale of varying exposure to Middle Eastern culture, ranging from characters who were born there but forced to leave because of politics/war to half-Arabs born in America and who do not speak Arabic to white photojournalists who become fully enamoured with that world without truly belonging to it.

Part 1 was a bit of a slog for me. I almost dnf about 40%. It felt almost like a poorly translated work. The flowery language became tiresome instead of atmospheric. I struggled to care about the uncle's interjected "fairy tale" or understand how it was adding anything to, instead of simply distracting from, Sirine's story but it does get there near the end of the book. 2.5 stars

Part 2 was a solid 4.5 stars. The second half of the book was great and almost felt written by a different author or at a different point of life. The development of character relationships literally made me gasp at times. Beautiful ending.

Crescent - is a thrilling romantic novel that gets you hooked very quickly.

The author's way of tying an immigrant love story with the internal struggle of belonging to the new land versus homeland is amazing. It was difficult to put the book down.

The parallel narrative of Omar Sharif in Hollywood is a brilliant added bonus.

I highly recommend it.

This was a rich tale of love and misplaced people who together formed a place that felt like a home. I liked this world in LA that I never knew was there. I loved the characters, food and atmosphere. The love story irritated me 70% along the way and my interest waned, but it closed in an acceptable way. It certainly opened up my perceptions of LA, where I love to hang out and added much more appeal. Also I was pleased to learn a new perspective of Iraq and its people and American role there.

Thematiek over koken en sprookjes was heerlijk. Verhaal zelf was prima

I didn't enjoy this book, but I forced myself to finish it and I'm not sure why I did. Sirine is a half-Iraqi chef who works at a Lebanese restaurant near UCLA. She has a love affair with a professor who is exiled from Iraq. Other characters include a depressed photographer, a scoundrel poet, a female college student, a loving uncle, and a feisty restaurant owner.

The first problem with this book is that it's supposed to be a love story of sorts, and I couldn't have cared less about the principal characters. Aside from being a chef and being beautiful, Sirine is completely uninteresting. And even that is nothing special - every romantic comedy every made has a chef in the title role. Han is moody and unappealing. The other characters fall flat too, or are caricatures of real people.

The second problem is with the writing itself. There are pages of descriptions of food. I like food writing, and I love Middle Eastern food, but these descriptions bored me to tears. I also noticed lots of extraneous adverbs (and adjectives...and full pages of descriptions...but the adverbs stood out most of all.) Stephen King says, "the road to hell is paved with adverbs" and says they're the mark of lazy writing. I agree.

Abu Jaber was also lazy in her attempt to describe Arab culture. Instead of any meaningful insights, she sends her characters to several different cultural events as a way to shed light on the culture. They go to an ethnomusicology department concert and hear some Arab music, so we learn about traditional Arab instruments. Sirine goes to a college women of Islam study group and we learn something about religion. They go hear a speaker and we learn something about the socio-political climate in Iraq. They have a Ramadan dinner with a bunch of students and professors and they talk about how they celebrate in their respective countries. All of these events felt really contrived.

There's a weird parallel story that's narrated by the uncle about his great great aunt and the Mother of All Fish. It seems like a folk tale, maybe? Every chapter kicks off with a little bit of this tale. Kind of interesting and actually better written than the rest of the book, but it's a non-sequitor. It just doesn't fit. Or maybe I just didn't get it.

I will say that I liked the back stories for all of the characters. She should take those back stories and start from scratch. They deserve to be in a better book than this.

i was surprised by how much emphasis this book had on the physical. when it turned attention to the status of the geophysical, mystical & culinary, i was esp. captivated. the production and reader were an added benefit!

Crescent was a book I was ho-hum about starting...not another immigrant story! How wrong I was and if not for the ending I would've given it 4 stars. The writing is as delicious as the food prepared throughout the novel, and the characters are people you want to know. This is a unique, imaginative, beautifully written novel.

The book was beautifully written but I had a hard time making myself care enough to read it. It might be that this book simply wasn't for me, since it is focuses on an Arab-American experience which is not my experience. I guess I had hoped the plot would be more compelling but it was a very slow burn. Still I absolutely loved the descriptions of food, in fact I was always getting hungry while reading this book. I also appreciated a story where the protagonist was 40 and not married and everyone didn't act like her life was over because she didn't have a man. I enjoyed parts of the romance between Sirine and Han but their problems all seemed like they could have been fixed with better communication. So overall I liked parts but the overall feeling when I finished the book was not satisfaction.