Leap of Faith

The book club I belong to decided to read Queen Noor’s “Leap of Faith: Mem­oirs of an Unex­pec­ted Life”, her auto­bi­o­graphy, and this is a sum­mary of our review. Part of the reas­on we chose this book was in the hopes that it would be a more access­ible way of learn­ing more about that part of the world, and par­tially because one of the mem­bers used to work in the same com­pany as Queen Noor when she was still Lisa Halaby, and was curi­ous as to what the book would be like.

The book was obvi­ously pop­u­lar amongst book clubs; there was a list of poten­tial ques­tions for people to dis­cuss in the back, most of which missed the point of the book in our opin­ion. So we ignored them.

Leap of Faith was writ­ten not only as an auto­bi­o­graphy, but also to expose Jord­an’s point of view to a wider (West­ern) audi­ence; Queen Noor is quite clear about that in the book. As such, it’s suc­cess­ful. It’s an easy read, though very choppy. The book has a mostly chro­no­lo­gic­al struc­ture, but keeps wan­der­ing off into themes and so you hear about vari­ous chil­dren and what they did before you get to read the chapter in which they’re born, for example. If you can read the book reas­on­ably quickly, then it all still hangs together. 

Our book club mem­ber who had known Lisa before (albeit not very well) poin­ted out that a lot of things were miss­ing; this is not a tell-all book and Queen Noor seems to be at some pains to paint her­self as naive and inno­cent before her mar­riage, des­pite her edu­ca­tion and work exper­i­ence. But the book does suc­ceed where it presents Jord­an’s point of view on issues, par­tic­u­larly the issue of Israel and Palestine. I am not par­tic­u­larly well read on Middle East­ern issues and pre­vi­ously had­n’t known that any­body there con­sidered the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979 a bad idea; the book goes into some detail on why (chiefly that many wanted a com­pre­hens­ive peace treaty and feared that a piece­meal solu­tion would hinder that). I also had­n’t known that Jordan is a poor coun­try with no oil, or any­thing about the Hashemites, and this book is an access­ible intro­duc­tion to both of those topics.

In sum­mary, I found the book worth read­ing even though the chop­pi­ness and incon­sist­en­cies annoyed me. A good intro­duc­tion to a part of the world that I did­n’t know enough about pre­vi­ously, and prob­ably still don’t, but at least I know more than I did.