Customer Reviews

Tea in the Harem

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I read this book after I read "Lila Says" by Chimo. These books are both similar in setting. It was a depressing but accurate description of life in the arab populated Paris ghettos. The value of life, the dead end feeling, and the chaos and feeling of hopelessness was depicted like I have never read before. The characters seemed real and the surroundings were easy to picture, very vivid. And you felt for everyone in the book especially the families who came to France for a better life and received something far worse- destruction of their culture, detrioration of their children, rascism, and the feeling of leaving a whole familiar world behind and being trapped in a concrete world. more than enyting it also has french characters too that are within the same situation. It is very much telling of the immigrant experience anywhere for arabs- they leave an opressive regime where they are poor and want better and think they are going to have an incredible life some where else, so they leave their country, their language, and their family behind in search. what they find is a world in repulsion with theirs where they are very different and it is hard to survive and with this everything they know is gone and their children are different from they are and feel even more disconnected from their surroundings and their parents world. Well written.

Tea in the Harem is an excellent account of life in the slums of Paris. It is at times disturbingly real and deals with Foreigners trying to make a go of it in the mean streets of France. I liked it because it reveals another side of Paris; a bleak, dirty, and dangerous side not often dealt with in books and movies. Anyone who has an interest in racial conflict and poverty will find this book enlightening. If you like tea, and you like harems, then you'll love Tea in the Harem.

Charef sucks you into the slums of Paris long enough to understand how life there truly is. I recommend this book to everyone; especially to middle and upper class individuals looking for an accurate perspective on lower class life.