Hi everyone. I'm Rincey and this is Rincey Reads.
Today I'm going to be doing a book review on
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid.
In this story you are mainly following these two
young people. One of them is this woman
named Nadia who is like fiercely independent
in a way that isn't really common in her
country. She wears like a full body
covering despite the fact that she's not
very religious but she has reasons why
she chooses to wear it. But she also like
rides a motorcycle and goes to school and
things like that.
She lives by herself and lies to
people and says she's a widow as to
explain and get permission to be able to
live by herelf. And then there is this
young man named Saeed. He sees Nadia in one of
his classes and basically just fall for her.
They start a relationship but they are
living in this war-torn country. As their
country starts to sort of fall apart,
they're forced to make some difficult
decisions about their relationships and
the way that they're living. You know,
like their basic necessities start to be
taken away from them. There's a point
where they no longer have cell
phones that are usable in the country
because there's like a lack of
electricity and there's no like
cellphone coverage anymore things like that.
So because their country's sort of
falling apart, they are forced to make
difficult decisions about their lives
and they choose to leave the country
eventually. And then follow them with all
the choices that they make and you see
them as refugees in another country.
If you watched my readathon wrap-up, you already know
that I love this book. I'm a big fan of
Mohsin Hamid. The first book I read from
him was How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
and I gave it a 5 star rating
because I loved it so much.
It completely blew me away.
The thing that I like about Mohsin Hamid
a lot is that he really
plays with a reader's expectations of the
story that you're getting. In his book
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
he provides a conversation between two
people and by the time you get to the
end of the book you realize that your
sort of preconceived notions about
what's happening in the story is not at
all what's happening in the story. And
then in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,
he writes it in second person and he writes
it in the style of like a self-help book.
So I think what Mohsin Hamid
does really, really well is he writes in
a way that sort of vague but still really
grounded. So it provides the reader the
opportunity to place themselves in the story
and place themselves in a story that
they normally would not necessarily
place themselves in. If you think of
really great writers who write about
like the Middle East or who write about
Muslims and have like sort of broken
through here and like the Western world, so to speak,
writers like Khaled Hosseini,
reading it from a Western point of view
you have a little bit of distance from
the story. While you're sympathetic
towards the characters and while you're
sympathetic towards the situations, there
is a little bit of separation there.
What Mohsin Hamid does is he places you like right
as the protagonist of these stories.
So you are like right in the middle of it
right in the midst of it and it makes you
much more empathetic towards the
situation that he's writing about.
So he's talking about refugees.
Another thing that he doesn't the story that's
really interesting is that in every
chapter. there are sort of the break from
the main story and you hear-- you read
sort of like little short stories about
other people around the world. And what
Mohsin Hamid is doing is he's playing
with your idea of who is a refugee and
who you considered to be a migrant and
who you consider to be an immigrant who you
consider to be worthy of the places that
they're living and things like that.
A lot of people are talking about the
timeliness of this book and that's
definitely true because refugees have
been a big part of the news. But if you
think about the history of the world or
even like the history of the past
a hundred years, there have always been some
sort of migrants situation or some sort
of refugee situation happening. Whether
it be Jewish people being forced out of
the various countries that they lived in
or you think of the Vietnamese or even
like Koreans to other countries or
Middle Easterners or whoever,
there's been situations all over the
world of people have been forced to
migrate from their home because of
war-torn situations. And so I feel like
this is one of those books is very
timely but it's also very timeless at the
exact same time. Yeah, Mohsin Hamid is just
like a fantastic writer. I think the one
recommendation that I would give to
anyone who wants to pick up this book is
try to read as much of it in one sitting
as possible. I read it over the course of
I think it was like three days, like
three different evenings I read it. And I
think that hindered the experience for me
slightly because the way this book is written,
it kind of puts like a spell over you. And I
think it's a book bed is best consumed
in one sitting if possible because you
can just fully immerse yourself in this world.
You let yourself fall under the
spell of this novel and you experience
the whole thing for what it's worth.
I could also see some people having
problems with the way this book has ended
because it doesn't end the way you think
it's going to. And I feel like the ending
is more concrete than the rest of
the book. But overall I really enjoyed it a lot.
I would highly, highly, highly
recommend this book to everyone. I think
that if you're someone who's watching my
channel and you like the content that I
make and the books that I talk about,
you're going to like Exit West by Mohsin Hamid.
It is very timely but it's also
very timeless and I think it's worth
picking up, 100%.
So yeah, those are my quick thoughts on Exit West
by Mohsin Hamid. It's a fantastic book.
I know a bunch of you guys picture for
your book of the month package this
month. So definitely leave a comment down
below letting me know what you guys thought of it.
Also if you haven't picked up a
copy of this yet and you would like one
for free, I'm giving a copy away. If you
head over to my book of the month
unboxing video, I'm giving away a copy of
Exit West and I'm also giving away a copy
of the reluctant fundamentalist by Mohsin
Hamid. There are two different
giveaways for that and I will be picking
the people for that giveaway at the end
of the month. So definitely check out
that video if you haven't already and
enter the giveaway if you haven't
already because again this is a book I
feel like everyone should just read.
It's so good. It's really short and it's really,
really beautifully written.
So yeah, that's all I have for now and thanks for watching.
