4 out of 4 stars
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My Trip to Adele is an enjoyable and intriguing novel, written by siblings A.I. and R.I. Alyaseer, that tells about love and life, all of this with the music of Adele in the background.
I was drawn to it by my own love for Adele’s music and by its settings, so different from each other and culminating in the suggestive Arena di Verona in Italy, a real gem of my country.
Throughout the chapters we follow the story of three dissimilar people whose lives have been deeply impacted by Adele’s songs.
The first protagonist we meet is Elias, a Moroccan man living in Rome, Italy. Eight years before, he met a very young Malika on a trip to Marrakesh, whom he left with the promise to meet again one day. The wish to find again his long lost love will lead him back to the suggestive scenarios of Morocco and to the memories of the brief moments they spent together.
The second story takes us to Las Vegas, USA, where the atheist Yaser and his wife Mariam, both extraordinary surgeons, are struggling to mend a marriage broken by routine, fights and the conflicting ideologies that once brought them together. Marriage counseling will force them to the difficult challenge of finding and agreeing upon a happy memory they want to relive.
The third protagonist is Nadia, a 32-year-old single and divorced mother from Amman, Jordan. In a patriarchal society that imposes the will of her abusive ex-husband and a circle of men who consider themselves above the law, she’s fighting to free herself and her 10-year-old son Waleed from their control and to grant her little family the best possible life.
The outcome of these three different storylines is the farthest it can get from cliché, giving abundant food for the readers’ thoughts, but you will have to read the book until the end to know how.
I'm a sucker for stories with multiple points of view because I love to see if and how the characters end up interacting and this book did not disappoint on that front, though not in the way I was expecting. So, my fangirl reaction to the ending was a gigantic "Wait... what?"
The main peculiarity of this novel is the way every chapter is entitled after an Adele song and contains (or ends with) a representative quote of the same to summarize and conclude the current state of the protagonist. Overall, the editing was good, I noticed only some minor issues with the formatting of the dialogues, but not enough distracting to take it one star down.
I loved My Trip to Adele and decided to rate this book 4 out of 4 stars for the original and engaging way in which it explores the thoughts and stories of the protagonists and the other characters involved. Although sharing similar origins (despite coming from Las Vegas, I suppose Yaser has an Arab origin?) the way the protagonists face their situations makes them unique and very relatable.
I recommend this book to anyone who loves the singer Adele and to anyone who wants to read a romance that’s creative and out-of-the-box.
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Trip to Adele
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