So I finished Katherine Webb’s A Half-Forgotten Song and I highly recommend it. If you are planning a beach vacation, do take the book with you, and you will have a blast.
The novel is filled with these monstrous, horrifying female characters who walk over anything or anybody to get what they want. They are surrounded by completely weak and pathetic male characters who dissolve completely when faced with the power of the female protagonists. This phenomenon is presented as multi-generational and not a product of any specific place or time.
The book doesn’t attempt to offer any explanations as to why the female characters are so unrelentingly evil and the male characters are so helpless and bumbling. This is simply a reality that is shown as in need of no reason or justification. I find this unapologetic way of constructing a narrative to be very curious.
I also liked the author’s way of depicting evil. We see a character who personifies every horror we can imagine but who is completely oblivious to how destructive she is. There is this degree of terrifying stupidity in this protagonist that is precisely the characteristic which makes her so dangerous. The scariest people are not the ones who plot and scheme but the ones who never stop to think at all.
If my impressions of the novel made you think it’s some sort of a Gothic thing, you can rest easy because it isn’t. There are no zombies, no weirdness, no pale-faced shadowy heroines. Just a very unusual story with unexpected characters.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m reminded of Women of Sand and Myrhh which shifts between four different female narrators (some of whom know each other). Three of the four have sympathetic sides but are also pretty flawed (even the one who’s most likeable treats her Asian employees pretty badly).
Anyhoo, the author (Hanan Al-Shaykh) tries to get into the head of the least sympathetic character who is fundamentally shallow and kind of vicious and it sort of works but first person narration means the deeper motivations aren’t there because the character has zero capactiy for self-reflection.
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