When the Taliban reclaimed power in Afghanistan in summer 2021, I was curious to learn more about this country. I had already read Khaled Hosseini’s books at the time, but I wanted to read stories told by differrent voices. After doing a little research, I came across books written Nadia Hashimi. I read Sparks like Stars straight away, but it took me a very long time to pick up another novel by this author. Why? I don’t know. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the audiobook narration for Sparks like Stars, even though I found the story intresting. After all these years, it was time for me to pick another Nadia Hashmi novel, When the Moon is Low. Did I find this one as interesting as the previous one?

About the book

When the Moon is Low Published by William Morrow on July 21, 2015
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780062369574
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, General fiction

Mahmoud’s passion for his wife Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she’s ever known. But their happy, middle-class world—a life of education, work, and comfort—implodes when their country is engulfed in war, and the Taliban rises to power.

In Kabul, we meet Fereiba, a schoolteacher who puts her troubled childhood behind her when she finds love in an arranged marriage. But Fereiba’s comfortable life implodes when the Taliban rises to power and her family becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime. Forced to flee with her three children, Fereiba has one hope for survival: to seek refuge with her sister’s family in London.

Traveling with forged papers and depending on the kindness of strangers, Fereiba and the children make a dangerous crossing into Iran under cover of darkness, the start of a harrowing journey that reduces her from a respected wife and mother to a desperate refugee.

Eventually they fall into the shadowy underground network of the undocumented who haunt the streets of Europe’s cities. And then, in a busy market square in Athens, their fate takes a frightening turn when Fereiba’s teenage son, Saleem, becomes separated from the rest of the family. Without his mother, Saleem is forced, abruptly and unforgivingly, to come of age in a world of human trafficking and squalid refugee camps.

Heartbroken, Fereiba has no choice but to continue on with only her daughter and baby. Mother and son cross border after perilous border, risking their lives in the hope of finding a place where they can be reunited.

My review

Expectations

Since I really enjoyed Sparks Like Stars and since hashimi’s novels get a lot of praise, my expectations for When the Moon is Low were quite high. It addresses the refugee crisis back in 2015, but which is still going on today. I was hoping to be sucked into this story and learn a lot about Afghanistan and the Afghan culture. Ufortunately, my expectations were not fully met. In fact, this book disappointed me and that has nothing to do with the audiobook. I didn’t like the narration at all since it’s very monotone. I switched to the ebook but my reading experience hasn’t improved unfortunately.

Characters

This story is centered around the Waziri family and is told from both mother Fereiba and the oldestt son Saleem. This should be working well, if the characters were written better. I didn’t feel any connection, they even felt distant to me. This is not because of a different frame of reference between me as a white reader and the characters of this novel, but they lacked emotion for me. At one point, saleem gets seperated from his family and even though Fereiba is desperate, it’s not really shown. There’s a lot told instead of shown and that gave me a hard time to get through this novel. It feels like I have been looking from afar to this family’s journey whereas I should be feeling emotionally invested. I can’t remember much about the characters and that’s such a pity.

Writing

I know Hashimi is able to write an investing story, but that wasn’t the case for this book. Even though the writing is easily flooding, there was no point in this book were I felt invested. The most intriguing part was the first part of the novel were Fereiba told us her story. We get glimpses of the Afghan culture and we also see some growth since she has to learn to let Saleem grow up. Then, we switch back and forth between mother and son and this improves the pace a lot honestly. The writing is adapted to the characters which works well.

Plot

Since this book focuses on the refugee crisis, it’s quite tense. We find a lot of cureent issues in this book as well as familiar places such as the refugee camps in Greece and “the jungle” in Calais. However, it feels like Hashimi wasn’t sure about the target audience for this book since both Saleem and Fereiba have it relatively easy. They manage to get to relatively safe places while others are handed down to the streets. Some more challenges would have made this book more intriguing to me. Don’t get me wrong, leaving your home and everything behind and your family getting seperated along the journey to safety is challenging enough, but the novel was rather boring. Some more challenges would have made it more tense and probably less distant. I saw someone on Goodreads saying that this book works well as a movie and I have to agree on this. Someone else states that it feels like it’s targeted to young adults, even though it’s marketed as adult. I can relate to this as well.

Final thoughts

Even though When the Moon is Low by Nadia Hashimi is addressing a very current topic, I was rather disappointed in this book. I felt a huge distance to the characters, I felt that they lacked emotions and therefore stay quite shallow. This problem expends to the plot which didn’t make me enjoy this book as much as I’d hoped to. It’s not that I won’t be reading any book by this author anymore, but it won’t be soon.