2 out of 4 stars
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A Review of The Expelled by Mois Benarroch
After a meet by chance with a woman who seems a younger version of his wife, the narrator goes to read one of his novels with the younger woman. The novel describes a bus hijacking by terrorists where several incidents happen and the riders on the bus become part of a caste, either the front people (those who sit in front of the bathroom) or the back people (those who sit behind the bathroom). The back people do what the front people tell them to do with minimal questioning. Throughout the bus ride, there a lot of detours which become stories within the bus story. Soon the novel becomes a story within story. The author shows us in the end how the narrator becomes a better man.
I rate this book 2 out of 4. The rating is a 2 because the book's structure seems more like an outline than a book and makes reading the story difficult. The author jumps from mini story to mini story without good transitions. There are a lot of grammatical errors as well as poor editing for spelling and spacing throughout the book.
The book appealed to me at first because it's under the genre sci-fi/fantasy. It does not fit within sci-fi and it's not really fantasy either. The book is fiction, but it fits more historical in nature because it's about a man's past similar to the past of his ancestors.
The story may appeal to someone who likes to read a story about a story within another story. An appealing feature is the historical feel of the narrator’s past in Morocco and the narrator’s references to Megorashim (expelled) and Toshabim (settled). If someone prefers a book about outsiders, this might be a good choice.
After several times rereading the story, I like how the author foreshadows the narrator’s comment of
I like the historical reference to the change of residence for the narrator’s family from Morocco to Spain and how the author describes being an outsider in his writing club.“. . . I'm thinking that if I write our encounter one day it'll be a story in which someone tells a story about someone who's telling a story.”
As stated in the rating section, the book jumps around too much with minimal transitional flow between story jumps. The author lost me several times within a story due to poor sentence structures. The book reads more as someone trying to brainstorm how to structure their book than an actual account of how an author may plan out their book.
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The Expelled
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