CBR17 Bingo: Culture – Caressa encounters and immerses herself in multiple cultures during her wanderings through the Sahara, including the Tuareg and the Hausa.
By the age of sixteen Caressa has been a carnie, a Boston schoolgirl, and the wife of an anthropologist – but in her years in the Sahara desert, she will go on to become a widow, a sorceress, a slave, and much more.
The trouble with this book is that the description is rather misleading. There’s a little magic, and a little time disguised as an Arab boy, and a few cunning tricks, but for the most part Caressa sort of drifts around the desert with far less agency that you’d originally suspect. The former is a closer description of my kind of book than the latter, alas.
I enjoyed the depictions of life among the various peoples that Caressa runs into, and the writing is beautifully vivid, bringing the feeling of the desert to life. I also loved the relationship between Caressa and Bakuli, the young slave-boy that she becomes close to throughout the book. I even enjoyed the romance between Caressa and Jared, once I’d applied the dispensation to it that one must apply to all bodice-ripper romances.
However, I did feel that the story was not as exciting as I’d been led to believe. Caressa definitely moves along with the current of whatever’s happening around her than really striking out on her own for much of the story, and though it makes sense for the setting and the character, it doesn’t make for very entertaining reading. The final section of the book, once we go on to Cairo and then London, also strike a strange tonal shift after everything that came before.