Book Reviews

A Review of A Sprinkle of Dust: A Mother’s Struggle with Loss and Healing by Mary Saad Assel (iUniverse, 2017)

            A Sprinkle of Dust: A Mother’s Struggle with Loss and Healing is a powerful memoir about a close-knit Arab-American family’s attempt to sustain a young man battling cancer and to recover after his death. Author Mary Saad Assel, a retired professor of English at Henry Ford College, has had an eventful life. Living in Lebanon, Senegal, and the United States, she has faced many crises with determination, strength, and love. Saad Assel writes in the prologue, “I was a wife at fifteen, a mother at sixteen, a widow at thirty-five, and heartbroken by the loss of my son at fifty” from a “terminal brain tumor” (p. xiii). This book “describes how I struggled to find hope and meaning in a challenging life” (p. xiv). She hopes to “ease the journey of other parents who have lost a child prematurely” (p. xv).  Using lyrical imagery and specific details, Saad Assel creates a memorable portrait of a unified and courageous family.             When her firstborn son Mazen is ten, kidnappers in Lebanon capture him.  Fortunately, they…

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Review of the Novel Matilda by Roald Dahl

Matilda, a novel for children by Roald Dahl first published in 1988, focuses on a precocious young girl whose parents mostly ignore her.  Matilda attends an elementary school run by the abusive Headmistress Trunchbull, who hates children.  Writing with a lot of figurative language and repeated sounds, Dahl shows readers how Matilda changes her life and the lives of those around her by using her intellect and imagination. Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood “show no interest” in their daughter Matilda, despite her being both “sensitive and brilliant” (“The Reader of Books,” p. 10).  While Mr. Wormwood works selling cars that are wrecks and Mrs. Wormwood plays Bingo, they leave their daughter home alone every afternoon.  By the age of three, the girl has taught herself to read, and at age four, she asks her father to buy her a book (pp. 12, 23-24).  He refuses, suggesting that Matilda watch television instead.  But the child discovers the local public library and reads all of the children’s books there (p. 13).  Then the librarian, Mrs. Phelps, recommends good…

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