An engaging evocation of Jordanian life

A perfectly accurate if totally inadequate description of Dima Bader’s debut novel Dance Around the Dandelion would be something like: “Nuha, a middle-age, married Jordanian woman, has a steamy affair with a much younger man.”

Accurate but insufficient to convey the depth and richness of Nuha’s life and family and contemporary society in Amman, Jordan, where the novel is set. The family is affluent enough they can send Nuha’s half-sister to Houston for cancer treatments. Ultimately the cancer returns, and the girl dies. The parents divorce, the mother returns to Kuwait City, and remarries. The father, Sameer, remarries and fathers Nuha and a son. 

Bader covers this history in the novel’s first section, which she tells in the third person. The adult Nuha narrates the rest of the book, broken up by brief—and ultimately poignant— diary entries by own 8-year-old daughter.

For much of the book, indeed until Nuha falls passionately, overwhelmingly, and unexpectedly in love with a darkly handsome young man who manages his family’s furniture store, she is going through the motions of life. Somehow (and I’d like to know how she does it) Bader is able to hold the reader’s interest while a depressed Nuha walks through her days. We learn about her extended family and life in her grandmother’s Big House, her marriage to Khaled, and her life as part owner of a bookstore in Amman’s Old Town.

Like most families, Nuha’s has secrets. I wouldn’t call Nuha an unreliable narrator, but even as she seems forthcoming the author reveals information carefully, naturally, and when it will have the most effect. And again, somehow the story—Naha’s history—grows in depth and richness as we learn more and more about it.

I thoroughly enjoyed Dance Around the Dandelion for the craft and for the story. Bader includes just enough Arabic (with translations) to let us know these characters are not speaking English. I would not have included the footnotes to explain Jordanian dishes because they tend to throw the reader out of the story. Nor would I have included the italic sections, but that may be a personal preference. Neither of these quibbles diminish the book’s undeniable and pleasant effect.