Gazelle

During the 1950s Egypt was a totally different place and the era of the unwanted American had not yet appeared. Pre-teen Elizabeth goes to Cairo with her parents when her father, a professor, on a Fulbright scholarship Elizabeth's father transported his wife and child to Cairo, Egypt for one year. It is here in the turbulent, yet quiet of exotic air that young Liz finds herself stuck with her ailing father when her mother (an Icelander) decides to leave. She doesn't go far just moves out of their abode and proceeds to demoralize her husband and shake her daughter's life. I love the prose of this novel. Ducornet's ability to draw the reader into the scene is wonderful. Recommend this book to anyone who likes good prose, and family life abroad - albeit with stress.

i loved this book with every fiber of my being!! i would have read it again and again but a couple months ago i lent it to a friend and havent seen it since. maby my love for it was partialy because i was in egypt when i read it. this book was very poetic and went indepth about the emptions of sexually frustrated young girls. i recomed this book to anyone who would take the time to read it! PS forgive any spelling mistakes you might find, i cant spell to save my life!

Gazelle is a first person account by a 13 year old of the summer in which her mother finally decides to leave her father, and herself. The novel is psychologically true, and one can observe the change in the girl as this event, and puberty alter her, but that is not the primary reason for reading Gazelle. The book is set in Egypt in the early 1950's, but it is a timeless Egypt that is evoked, the days of ancient Egypt as well as the bazaars of the 1950's.. The writing captures the impressions on all the senses, and has as a major character a seller/producer of perfumes whose ambition it is to rediscover some of the perfumes of the ancients. I recommend Gazelle especially to those readers, like myself, who have struggled with any of the novels of the Alexandria Quartet and found it mostly inaccessible. Where I feel Gazelle fails is in the character of the father. He just doesn't add enough to the novel for a character who is on stage so much.