Mosaic [Hardcover]

Soheir Khashoggi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 23, 2004

Set against the bustling backdrop of New York City and the exotic splendor of Jordan, Mosaic is a story of love and betrayal, of a clash of cultures and traditions---and one woman's struggle to rebuild her life.

Like many working mothers, Dina Ahmed has become adept at juggling her family and her work. She's the owner of Mosaic, a thriving floral design business, and has been blessed with success, beauty, and, most important, a happy family.

But when she returns home one day to discover that her six-year-old twins have vanished, Dina is forced to admit that her life and her marriage were not as perfect as she'd once believed. After many desperate phone calls---and anxious hours spent piecing the puzzle together---Dina accepts the terrible truth: Her husband, Karim, has taken the twins to his homeland of Jordan to raise the children with his family there.

The authorities can do nothing to bring Dina's children back, and even her father's contacts in the U.S. State Department are of little help. Karim's family is wealthy and powerful, and even though Dina is half Arab herself, her options are limited.

Distraught, but determined to fight, Dina travels to Jordan to confront her husband and to enact a desperate plan to get her children back---but at what risk?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Khashoggi (Mirage) blends a family drama's thoughtfulness with a thriller's tension in this fast-paced novel about a half-Lebanese Manhattanite whose husband, in doing what he believes is right, turns her world upside down. Dina Ahmed thought she had the nearly ideal cross-cultural life: her husband, Karim, is a successful diplomat from a wealthy Jordanian family; her twins, Ali and Suzanne, are lively and well adjusted, well cared for by Karim's spinster aunt; and her chic floral boutique, Mosaic, is thriving. But Karim, plagued by the vague suspicion he's faced after 9/11 and convinced he must save the twins from the American influences he feels have already ruined his and Dina's gay teenage son, Jordy (from whom Karim is estranged), takes Ali and Suzanne to his family home in Amman and vows to raise them there. Dina learns that she has few legal options, and the high-priced detective she consults turns down a rescue job because of Karim's powerful family. Frustrated and frantic, Dina turns to a low-profile PI named John Constantine; after visiting Karim's home in Amman, the detective recommends that Dina journey to visit her children so he can organize a rescue operation during her stay. Khashoggi's taut storytelling keeps the suspense high throughout, and the plot twists are both surprising and realistic, as the author wisely avoids both thriller clichés and post-9/11 politics to engineer a series of believable, thought-provoking compromises.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Like her debut, Mirage (1995), Khashoggi's second novel sculpts a broader understanding of Arab women's lives, both in the Middle East and America. Dina Ahmed has it all, a happy family and flourishing floral-design business, but her world ruptures when she discovers that her husband, Karim, has kidnapped their eight-year-old twins from New York and returned with them to his homeland in Jordan. Dina enlists her good friends Sarah, a Jewish physician, and Emmeline, a "Creole Martha Stewart," to help her pick up the pieces and find a way to fight back. All the while, Dina must shield her eldest son, who has been rejected by his father for being gay, while risking all to regain her twins. Delicate subjects--from the complexity of marriage to the clash of American and Islamic cultures--are approached with care and balance, and the combination of savvy writing and three-dimensional characters brings refreshing depth and perspective to this highly charged, emotional story. Misha Stone
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Forge Books; First Edition edition (September 23, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765312352
• ISBN-13: 978-0765312358
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,290,511 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Utterly enthralling, June 22, 2005

By 

C. Sarges "winterfyre" (Eastern Iowa USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mosaic (Mass Market Paperback)

I haven't written an Amazon.com book review in several years; however, when I went to Amazon to look for Khashoggi's other books, I couldn't believe no one had written a review on "Mosaic", a book I finished just moments ago and will relish for some time to come. I picked up this book at a grocery store, but it deserves a far better venue. I typically shun Oprah's book recommendations, but "Mosaic" deserves that sort of publicity. It certainly would lend itself wonderfully to a book club discussion. Khashoggi's writing style is fluid in a way rarely seen in popular fiction today. I won't get into the details of the plot, but this one is a keeper. Kudos to Soheir Khashoggi for drawing me into a can't-put-down, beautifully written, unforgettable story.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Okay if there isn't something better around, July 10, 2005

By 

Backyard reader (Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mosaic (Hardcover)

Having read numerous other books on a similar subject, I have to say that I was disappointed in this one. While the writing style is nice, and the idea of having one's children taken away is indeed emotional, I found that in this book all conflicts wrapped up nicely, neatly, and FAR too easily and quickly at the end. So quickly and easily, in fact, that there may as well have been no conflict at all, and what's worse, the author starts setting up the easy resolution pretty early on. I kept reading thinking there would be a twist at the end, but nope--if you read this book and after about the first third, you start to think--it can't really be that easy, can it?--well, yes, it can.

If you're looking for a light read with unneccesary romantic side stories for the lesser characters, this is a great choice. Not a horrible book, but not a book that makes me want to read her other two.

4.0 out of 5 stars A Story With No Villains, January 29, 2010

By 

E. B. (Kansas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mosaic (Mass Market Paperback)

Dina is the American wife of Karim, an Arab from Jordan. The couple live in New York in post 911 days. A working mother of young twins and an older boy who has just confessed to being gay, Diana is devestated when Karim takes the twins, without her knowledge until they are gone, to his family home in Jordan. His feeling is that America has corrupted his older son and he cannot allow that to happen to the twins, especially the boy. The book is an easy read and kept my attention. I titled this review "A Story With No Villains" unless one would classify the clash of cultures as such. Prepared to hate Karim, I came to understand how culture shaped his thinking,as culture shapes all our thinking. Eunice Boeve, author of Maggie Rose and Sass