Product Description

Gamrah’s faith in her new husband is not exactly returned … Sadeem is a little too willing to please her fiancé … Michelle is half-American and the wrong class for her boyfriend’s family … While Lamees works hard with little time for love. The girls of Riyadh are young, attractive and living by Saudi Arabia’s strict cultural traditions. Well, not quite. In-between sneaking out behind their parents’ backs, dating, shopping, watching American TV and having fun, they’re still trying to be good little Muslim girls. That is, pleasing their families and their men. But can you be a twenty-first century girl and a Saudi girl?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #321729 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From the Back Cover
`Wonderfully vivid, highly readable. Will tell you more about one of the world's oddest and most closed societies than a library of books...excellent' New Statesman

'A tell-all novel set in the Islamic world's most conservative society' Telegraph

`Offers a rare glimpse into the lives of women of "the velvet class"...brave and surprisingly informative' Guardian

`An absorbing expose of life behind the veil' Daily Telegraph

About the Author
Rajaa Alsanea grew up in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the daughter of a family of doctors. She currently lives in Chicago where she is a dental graduate student. She is twenty-five years old and this is her first novel. Originally released in Arabic in 2005, Girls of Riyadh was immediately banned in Saudi Arabia due to controversial and inflammatory content. Black-market copies of the novel circulated and the daring originality of Girls of Riyadh continues to create a firestorm all over the Arab world and has been a bestseller across much of the Middle East.

Customer Reviews

Outstanding Middle Eastern Sex in the City...
It comes as no surprise, to me at least, the emotions, issues and insecurities mirror those of women in the rest of the world. The difference is the playing field has different rules. This book is a fantastic read and has you laughing and crying as you live the events of the book with the characters, described by Rajaa Alsanea-a Saudi Carrie Bradshaw. It is ingeniously written as a series of emails, over a period of time which only enhances the anticipation of what happens next.

I found the book riveting as well as fascinating as it tells so much about Saudi culture that is veiled in the rest of the world. The book was banned in Saudi because it cuts too deep in the bone of what really happens behind closed doors of Saudi society. Taken in context, it has de-cloaked the Saudi woman as human, intelligent and sensitive.

The pain these women go through is no different to the infidelities women everywhere experience, and the fact you can relate to the numerous events that befall our main characters, makes this all the more a book every woman can relate to. Unfortunately men seem to hold the power, but are we really that different? From marriage, friendship, to sisterhood, this book is undiscovered treasure. The best read I've had so far this year.

Saudi Chick-Lit!!
This book really is good. It blasts away all those stereotypes of Saudi women leading miserable, loveless lives with absolutely no freedom. The four main characters in this book have varying opinions about how a woman should live her life and what's important. They also have goals, ambition and desires - like women in the west, although it's different with an eastern twist to it.

Of course the four main characters in the book have a difficult time finding love and without doubt they are to some extent under the control of the men in their families, but along the way they manage to meet and flirt with men, have boyfriends and even have some physical contact with them. It's just the way they do things over there is different from the way it's all done in the west.

But it isn't any the less passionate for that.

The four girls Lamees, Gamrah, Sadeem and Michelle manage to find their men outside a shopping mall, at work, among their relatives and abroad and they have real relationships with them. OK a lot of the relationship is conducted on mobile telephones, but that's as good a way as any to get to know someone properly - after all you are still talking to them.

I realise that these women who are from the Saudi "velvet" class - the rich elite, (though not the Royal family) are quite priviledged and not necesarily representative of all Saudi women. But it's nice to see them as real human beings and not just silent shrouded people.

Eat the Rich
I have an interest in modern Arab fiction, so when I saw this Saudi novel was translated and published by a major press I couldn't resist checking it out. Unfortunately, the story is pretty thin gruel and fails to provide a particularly rich or insightful glimpse into the Arab world -- or rather, 99.9% of the Arab world. It revolves around the social life of the rich and pampered young elite of the Saudi kingdom, and the picture it paints is not very pretty. Framed as a kind of online serialization of a roughly six-year span in the lives of four young women of the "velvet class", the story is confined to soap opera antics that could occur among privileged teens in China, India, Canada, or any number of other places.

The four co-protagonists are Sadeem, Gamrah, Michelle and Lamees -- girls of roughly similar backgrounds (although Michelle spent a good deal of her childhood in the West) who become friends in high school. Though they are of varying temperament, they are like teens and young people everywhere, mainly obsessed with the opposite sex. Unfortunately for them, the oppressive social climate of Saudi Arabia makes actual interaction rather problematic. For example: shopping malls operate such that men and women cannot mingle, wooing consists of driving next to a carload of women and holding up signs with one's cell-phone number, and speaking of cell phones -- billing records are scrutinized by family and prospective in-laws to asses the wholesomeness of a prospective bride.

This separation of the sexes leads to a lot of daydreaming and romanticizing among the four women, which in turn leads to some predictably bad relationships. Some are so intent on getting married that they leap into marriage with the first man who comes along, and are then caught in bleak, loveless marriages. Others are so intent on "true love" that they ignore all the warning signs and become emotionally entangled with men who have no intention of marrying them. Many of these predicaments follow the familiar storylines of "love matches" vs. arranged marriages in a supposedly modern society -- a topic that's been more or less done to death by South Asian writers. In the same vein, relationships that cross class lines are pretty much taboo, a theme well-covered in British literature.

Ultimately, it's hard to care for any of these pampered, haute couture-consuming brats when their love lives crash and burn. Lip service is paid to feminism, and that's certainly a valid point to be made in terms of Saudi society, however these four women are awfully superficial messengers.