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Surprisingly enough, I enjoyed this a lot. A really interesting look into Bedouin culture, and deciphering all the accented, dialectical, bizarrely-transcribed Arabic was a lot of fun, even if it did make me realise what an embarrassing mistake I made in my oral exam last semester.

Most interesting, though, was the narrative voice. Taking the book at face value, which is probably stupid - she even said at the end that she left out a lot of the bad stories because she's not interested in remembering them - Marguerite is a truly interesting personality. For a New Zealander to slip so easily into the life of a Bedouin woman, to adopt their cultural quirks and foibles with so little resistance and so much ease, seemed utterly extraordinary to me. That someone could be open-minded and open-hearted enough to grow to love it as she did, I can barely believe. Probably this says more about me than it does about her.

I did find it strange how little she questioned the things that were going on around her. Everything was reported as if by a totally impartial observer: the example that really struck me was when she talked about the men bringing over second or third brides from Egypt. I was expecting some small attempt at analysis, or at least empathy, but there was nothing; no hint that they might have experienced loneliness and culture shock from being uprooted from Cairo to a cave in the desert of Jordan, nothing really except a comment that she couldn't understand their accents. But this is typical of the book, really: no emotions are described except for her love for her Bedou husband. Strange, and interesting.