Customer Reviews

Virgins of Paradise

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have read some of Barbara Wood's books, but Virgins of Paradise is the crown jewel of her writings. The story takes us back to 1945, to Egypt at the close of the Second World War and a powerful family from the highest circles of nobility, the Rasheeds. They are the friends of royalty, rich and influential, and their every move is judged by the gravitas of their status. But under the veil of wealth and power lies a web of secrets even thicker than blood whose disclosure could spell the downfall of the family. As time goes by and tremendous incidents ravage Egypt, winds of war, treachery, dishonor, scandal, and forbidden love descend upon the once peaceful house of the Rasheeds on Virgins of Paradise Street. Flashes of events and voices echo from the past and as if by the hand of fate toss the family from one predicament into another. The patriarch of the Rasheeds, Ali is dead, but his posthumous influence remains strong. While Ibrahim his son is the nominal head of the house, it is Amira, Ali's widow, who is the eminence grise, the "invisible" hand that guides the family and holds its deepest secrets. Amira keeps secrets of her own and towards the end she embarks on a journey to uncover the mystery of her origins, which has been haunting her for decades. Tradition and Muslim law play a big role in the unfolding of the story's events, and many points in the culture are discussed and compared with Western culture in a fascinating way through the voices of the characters themselves. Although the two main characters are supposed to be Yasmina and Camelia, they are only two of the lively characters (like Alice and Nefissa) who all contribute to the colorfulness of this story. What is most touching though is that no matter how far the characters travel to escape their past (California, France, England, Lebanon...), their fates are always tied to that quaint home on Virgins of Paradise Street, the witness to generations of Rasheeds, throbbing with their memories, their mysteries, their fears, and their secrets. Barbara Wood's writing is exuberant and vivid to the point that for days after reading the book, I felt a sense of nostalgia for a home I had never seen in my life. The exotic smells and tastes and colors that make up Cairo seem to waft out of the book's pages. Barbara Wood's Virgins of Paradise is not merely a book to be read but an enchanting experience to be lived and felt.

This novel has become a winter favorite for me. Snowed in on dark winter evenings I love to snuggle up with this book and allow it to take me away to another world.

Virgins of Paradise, by Barbara Wood, is an exquisitely painted picture of a Muslim family through five decades of love found and lost, war, royalty, loyalty, family ties broken and mended.

Though the ghostly presence of the elder Rasheed floats throughout the story, the rock-solid core of the Rasheed household is really Amira, his wife. She anchors the family with wisdom, her devout beliefs, and her healing herbs. Ibrahim, her son, in comparison, is a weak shell. It is the women in this story who seem to have all the strength, though their society has oppressed them.

This a moving and intriguing tale of the evolution of a family through its births, deaths, weddings, and daily life. Wood writes with such rich detail, you can feel all the research she did before writing this novel. She whisks you away to the hot, dusty city of Cairo, its narrow streets crowded with peddlars, beggars, and men thinking of a revolution.

The reader will want to know Amira's dark secret, find out what happened to the banished Rasheed family member, see if Nafisa will find love across enemy lines, and follow the lives of Camilla and Yasmina to adulthood.

It's winter; it's about time for me to visit with the Rasheeds again.

Having lived in the Islamic world for several years, I found this book entertaining but also quite insightful to the culture of family life dominated by men. The author fully explores a core group of characters and uses satellite characters to flesh out the family saga. I never had read anything by Barbara Wood, but after reading this book, I have ordered more of her works. The bottom line: entertaining to read, AND I learned something.

This novel of soap opera style love, honor and family secrets is intelligently told against a backdrop of Egyptian politics with a feminist theme focusing on the oppression of women in a male-dominated society of centuries long tradition. The rights of women and men in Egypt are drastically different. There is a passage in the book where one woman decrees that women should be informed by their husbands if they are being divorced, informed if they are taking a second or third wife, be given the right to divorce their husbands if they are being physically abused...basic rights that I expect as an American woman. A young woman in the novel dishonors her family by being raped, another because her hymen was broken innocently and she would not produce blood as proof of her virginity on her wedding night.

Amira is the matriarch of the prosperous Rasheed family. The story begins in 1945 and it is Amira's ever-present voice throughout that links the many women and children as their lives unfold through the years until the end of the book in the early 90's. Her husband has died and her son Ibrahim is now the head of the family. His first wife dies while giving birth to his daughter Camelia. Driven by grief and shame for not having a son, he curses God and disappears to Europe. He comes back with an English wife, Alice who also bears him a daughter, Yasmina. Although they want more children, the couple has bad luck with subsequent pregnancies and like many men in Egypt, Ibrahim becomes obsessed with producing male heirs. He takes the drastic measure of claiming the son of a beggar girl as his own. Most of the story focuses on Amira, Ibrahim, Alice, Camelia and Yasmina although there is a large cast of supporting characters.

I was appalled by the lack of rights and limited choices for women. It was entertaining and educational without being overly preachy or political. It was a fairly long book at 600 pages, but I really enjoyed reading it. Recommended.

Nobody beats Barbara Wood when it comes to lengthy, historical, romantic novels. This book is no exception- she must have spent years researching Egyptian culture... you feel like you're in the mansion on Virgins of Paradise Avenue, painting kohl on your eyelids with your sisters-in-law while your husband aids the king. You can imagine wearing a heavy veil over your eyes and covering your skin, because as a female culture dictates you must. As a teenager, I loved this book because it helped me imagine what my life would be like in a totally different part of the world. She also weaves in a reference to her novel Green City in the Sun... if you're interested in Jasmines medical work you should consider reading that book as well. This is just a well written book with a honest female perspective... what more could you ask for?

This was one of those absolutely delicious books that I eat up like an exquisite food. Jasmine is an Egyptian woman, banished by her father from his wealthy household when he discovers that Jasmine was raped, and therefore has dishonored the family. This is one of the many injustices encountered by the women characters in this story in a society dominated by men who justify their actions by their religion. Some of the women accept this, but a few struggle to speak out for equality and modernization, often at the risk of their lives.

I finished reading this book two months after the terrorist attack on New York, when there is a lot of talk about fundamentalist Islam. The plot includes the ideas of killing for the sake of God, of fundamentalists striving to return Egypt to its old ways, restricting women's freedoms, and beating them if even an ankle shows.

In spite of this ugliness, there is much romance, passion, sexual longings, and family secrets that weave throughout several generations of the wealthy Rasheed family, as their lives coincide with changing political tides in Egypt, beginning with the monarchy of King Farouk, and passing through succeeding presidencies. There is gentle suspense and intrigue, and characters to love as well as to hate. All this made for a delicious story, yet because of its setting and focus on Islam, I was constantly pulled to think about the reality of it in relationship to current events. It's very enlightening, and though fiction, an important book for understanding the present time.

This review is for the Little, Brown and Company first edition, a paperback, published in Great Britain in 1993, 598 pages. Ms. Wood has published 18 novels with another due out shortly. VIRGINS OF PARADISE was Ms. Wood's third BIG novel. Read all about this author at www.barbarawood.com.

VIRGINS OF PARADISE is a long novel that recounts the sociological changes in Egypt from 1945 to around 1992 by tracking the Rasheed clan, a wealthy and initially aristocratic family whose locus is a mansion on Virgins of Paradise street in Cairo. Ms. Wood divides her story into seven parts, each one a significant slice of time in recent Egyptian history, and relates how the extensive Rasheed family fared through the social and political upheaval.

The baseline is set in 1945 when, at the end of WWII, the British occupation disintegrates and the royal aristocrats reign, but there are portents of change. Part two, begins on Black Saturday, January 23, 1952, when a mob destroys mostly British interests in Cairo and continues through July of that year and the exile of King Farouk, which precipitates upsets and tragedy for the Rasheeds. In part three, in 1962, we see how the Rasheeds have coped with the sociological changes under Abdel Nassar. For part four, the plot continues with the intricacies, secrets and crises of the Rasheed clan in 1966/1967 up to the eve of the six-day war. Nassar dies in 1970. Part five picks up the epic in 1973 after President Sadat has made some changes. Here, the story shifts in part to Southern California where Jasmine (Yasmina), born in part one and disowned in part four, is studying medicine. In part six, the story tracks both the Rasheeds in Egypt and the outcast Jasmine in 1980 and into 1981, when President Mubarak assumes control after the assassination of Sadat. The plot gets sticky as the swirl of lives begin to converge and clash in part seven, in 1988. The epilogue, sometime in the early nineties, picks up where the epilogue left the reader wondering.

The western connection in VIRGINS OF PARADISE begins with Alice, a blond Brit who becomes the second wife of Ibrahim, the dominant Rasheed male. Alice and Ibrahim beget Yasmina, who we meet in the prologue as a protagonist. Written in the omniscient, everybody's point of view, there are many protagonists in VIRGINS OF PARADISE. My favorite is Amira, the widowed matriarch raised in the old days when, once married, a woman never left her home. But Ms. Wood takes us behind the veils and lets the reader grasp the values and the frustrations of the Egyptian woman in a changing society.

This is character driven women's fiction at its best. The eclectic cast of female characters, a virtual harem, allows for multiple scenarios, permutations on the plight of woman in a repressive society where she is circumcised at puberty, betrothed without her consent, excoriated if she does not produce a male, and can be discarded by her husband saying "I divorce" three times. The several generations of Rasheed women allow the author to play out a spectrum of solutions to the female predicament. VIRGINS OF PARADISE is an epic portrayal of women coping in a patriarchal society.

If you are an American born woman of any race, when you finish this book you will kiss the soil on which you were born and thank your God that you were. If you are a male of any race you will understand some of the horrors of being a woman and learn some compassion. I would highly recommend this book to anyone 15 years of age or older. This book tells the story of the men and women in a muslem household infiltrated by a anglo-saxton that changes everything. It's set in Egypt and crosses a couple of generations and how they coped with the changing world and changing western and muslim values. Very well researched. Well written. Gripping story by one very talented author! I highly recommend many of her other books if you've never read her but this one is probably her very best and certainly the one myself and most of my friends remember her by. Barbara Wood is an undiscovered American Treasure!

Lets just say I prefered reading than eating or sleeping. I couldnt put it down once I had started reading it. I love the way she combines history with fiction, love and hate, real with unreal... I could read it a thousand times and never get tired.

This is book about A rab women,giving an insight one would not otherwise get about their lives and families. It tells of a male dominated society,where,in reality the women are the stronger presence