the almond tree by michelle cohen corasanti

While the advanced mathematics illustrates that Ichmad is very bright for his age, which becomes relevant to the plot, these sections are extremely unreadable. Ichmad is extremely gifted, and his coping method for stressful situations is to focus on making mundane calculations about objects around him. It’s difficult to get behind a character whose thoughts are so tediously patronizing everyone around him. Her protagonist, Ichmad, is on the whole entirely unlikeable. I found myself questioning Corasanti’s decision to make the only ‘bad Israeli’ an Arab, while other, white Israeli characters in the novel that started off prejudiced consistently saw the error of their ways as the novel and their relationship to the protagonist progressed. Not to say such a person could not exist, but it seemed like a poor example for this context. The token bad Israeli was a Jewish man from Iraq that was routinely taunted Ichmad and his brother at their place of work, which seems unlikely given the anti-Arab racism prevalent in the novel and Israeli policies. However, what might have been an attempt to dispel generalizations ended up detracting from the believability of the characters. There was a distinctly neutral tone to Corasanti’s set of characters, providing the reader with good Israelis and bad Israelis, and good Palestinians and bad Palestinians. On the other hand, I had a lot of problems with the way she went about it. On the one hand, I appreciate the author’s effort to tell a comprehensive story about Palestine that illustrates the hardship experienced by so many throughout the last 63 years. I am of two minds when it comes to this book. Michelle Cohen Corasanti’s The Almond Tree is the fictional memoir of Ichmad Hamid, a Palestinian man who is forced to the head of the family at the age of twelve when his father is arrested for terrorism.

The almond tree by michelle cohen corasanti