Very stately and pleasant as Shaherezade visits all of the children and the family slowly comes together. I liked the character of Decimal Jones but the typeface for her letter was hard on my eyes. A gentle family story. ( )

A charming multi-generational tale about a Lebanese-American family. When we join the story 85 year-old Fatima is 6 days away from the 1,001st day living with her gay grandson Amir in Hollywood after divorcing her husband Ibrahim in Detroit. Every night she tells a story to the spirit Scherezade, who visits far-flung members of Fatima's dysfunctional family to better understand them, while Fatima frets over who will inherit her mother's house in Deir Zeitoon, Lebanon. The tale has just enough comic relief and levity to keep the dysfunction from becoming overwhelming and depressing. ( )

This is a smart, laugh-out-loud book. The story is clever and imaginative. I still chuckle at various times, remembering scenes from the book. ( )

http://www.bostonbibliophile.com/2010/05/review-night-counter-by-alia-yunis.html ( )

Disappointing.

I really didn't enjoy this book. It took me over a week to trawl through all the disjointed sagas of each of the characters' disconnected lives and although the end does explain why the family is so disfunctional, it was not enough to reward my perseverance.

The rather tall premise is that the elderly Fatima is visited nightly for 1001 nights by an apparition of Sheherazade that only she can see. Everyone else concludes that she is talking to herself.
Thankfully we do not join her until day 992 when she has just 9 days left to put her life in order and decide what to leave for each of her grown children.
Originally from Lebanon, Fatima came to the US as a young bride and has not returned since. Her 10 offspring are American in varying degrees, some have produced grandchildren and even great grandchildren. All of them have problems but they hide these from their mother and from each other so that each is an island, alone.
It was, overall, a rather sad book; so many lives disrupted by their inability to communicate with each other, to share and help one another.

I did find the assimilation af the American way of life quite interesting. Some embraced their new culture while others dug into their history for their identity. The intervention of 9/11 also had repercussions for this Arab family and they are plagued by some inept, rather annoying FBI agents too.

I had hoped for great things from this book, it is a genre that I generally favour, but this was a disappointment. ( )