Review

When it comes to Zeitoun, our group was pretty split. The only thing that we seemed to agree on was that this story was powerful. It was filled with moments of true heroism and courage, which we all loved and enjoyed. But, one of the main things that we disagreed on was the amount of background we received on Zeitoun. Rachel and Isana really enjoyed the random facts and stories from Zeituon’s childhood, they both thought that it gave them special insight into who he is as a person. And although they might have been unnecessary, they were nice to read and enjoyable.

On the other hand, I found this type of writing to be chaotic and kind of bipolar in a sense. You would be in the middle of a story and it would go back to fishing, which in my mind really didn’t make much sense. Yes, I understand that Zeitoun has a canoe, and yes, when he was a child he was a skilled fisherman, and yes, those both involve a lot of water, but how do those correlate other than that? Even the dialogue about his brother Ahmed didn’t really connect very well. I know that he was Zeitoun’s hero, and that he brought happiness upon his family. But he didn’t symbolize much more to me than that. Eggers as a writer also seemed to have this tendency to have slow, anticlimactic writing. He would slowly build up to something that really was anticlimactic and disappointing. It didn’t, in my opinion, get me excited to keep reading. I didn’t feel the need to find out what was going to happen next.

In Michelle’s point of view, she found this book to be reasonable and that it has a significant point that should be expressed. However, like myself, she found this book to also be slow, and at times anticlimactic. It’s not that all the flash backs and added details are unnecessary, but at times it seemed as if the writing could have been used in a different form to move the book along in a more interesting and slightly faster pace.

Overall, the group had very different feelings about the book. I guess that’s good for Eggers. He’s created a book that has multiple areas of interest so that even the people who didn’t necessarily love it, still left it feeling like they hadn’t completely wasted their time. I understand why people, such as Isana, liked this book. It’s a story that is filled with family, love, happiness, strength and bravery, and to that I say: GOOD JOB DAVE!