Too Soon: A Novel

by Betty Shamieh

Overview

For readers of Pachinko and Queenie, a funny, sexy, and heart-wrenching literary debut that explores exile, ambition, and hope across three generations of Palestinian American women.

Arabella gets an unexpected chance at love when she’s thrust into a conflict and history she’s tried to avoid all her life.

Zoya is playing matchmaker for her last unmarried granddaughter and stirring up buried memories.

Naya is keeping a secret from her children that will change all their lives.

Thirty-five-year-old Arabella, a New York theatre director whose dating and career prospects are drying up, is offered an opportunity to direct a risqué cross-dressing interpretation of a Shakespeare classic—that might garner international attention—in the West Bank. Her mother, Naya, and grandmother, Zoya, hatch a plot to match her with Aziz, a Palestinian American doctor volunteering in Gaza. Arabella agrees to meet Aziz, since her growing feelings for Yoav, a celebrated Israeli American theatre designer, seem destined for disaster...

With biting hilarity, Too Soon introduces us to a trio of bold and unforgettable voices. This dramatic saga follows one family’s epic journey fleeing war-torn Jaffa in 1948, chasing the American Dream in Detroit and San Francisco in the sixties and seventies, hustling in the New York theatre scene post-9/11, and daring to stage a show in Palestine in 2012. Upon learning one of them is living on borrowed time, the three women fight to live, make art, and love on their own terms. A funny, sexy, and heart-wrenching literary debut, Too Soon illuminates our shared history and asks, how can we set ourselves free?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668046548
Publisher:	Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	01/28/2025
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	550,455
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

Betty Shamieh (she/her) is a Palestinian American writer and the author of fifteen plays. She is the playwright-in-residence at the Classical Theatre of Harlem. Her six New York play premieres include the sold-out off-Broadway runs of Roar and Malvolio, a sequel to Twelfth Night, which were both New York Times Critic’s Picks. Shamieh was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and named a UNESCO Young Artist for Intercultural Dialogue. She is a founding artistic director of The Semitic Root, a collective that supports innovative theatre cocreated by Arab and Jewish Americans. A graduate of Harvard College and the Yale School of Drama, she lives with her family in San Francisco.

Editorial Reviews

09/23/2024

Playwright Shamieh’s debut novel tracks three generations of Palestinian American women through war, emigration, and the search for creative fulfillment. Arabella, an off-Broadway director in her mid-30s, has spent her career resisting her peers’ calls to protest Israel and represent Palestinian people in her work. She’s also been stymied in her attempts to land a prominent production, however, so when she’s offered the chance to direct a buzzy adaptation of Hamlet, to be staged in Ramallah, she accepts, rewriting the lead character as a woman named Hamleta. In the West Bank, she meets Aziz, the grandson of a man who was the object of her grandmother Zoya’s secret infatuation more than six decades earlier, before Zoya and her husband were forced to flee Jaffa during the 1948 displacement. Shamieh weaves together Arabella and Zoya’s stories, along with the coming-of-age of Arabella’s mother, Naya, the rebellious youngest daughter of Zoya. The novel’s rapid-fire resolutions feel somewhat jarring after the expansive storytelling. Better is the character work, as Shamieh ably portrays the distinguishing traits of each of her leads—Zoya’s aching desire for her lost homeland, Arabella’s snarky humor, and Naya’s mix of bravado and insecurity—as well as the ties that bind them, such as Arabella’s theater work and Zoya’s tendency to playact as a child during the British occupation. This rich saga upends received narratives about motherhood and migration. Agent: Mary Krienke, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Too Soon is about what it means to leave home, what it means to return home, and what happens when home is an elusive concept. Sharp, propulsive, and irreverent, this story is profound without ever becoming ponderous—and I haven’t been this excited about a debut novel in a long time.” —Rebecca Makkai, author of I Have Some Questions for You

“Shamieh’s tone—present throughout, but strongest in Arabella’s sections—is confiding and chatty, a Carrie Bradshaw if Carrie had to worry about getting detained at Ben Gurion Airport by Israeli guards for eight hours. But this book isn’t fluffy: Its ethically complex characters carry heavy weights. Shamieh refuses easy moral lessons, aiming for complexity and nuance with a light, voicey touch.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Too Soon braids the lives of three passionate Palestinian women as they move through a turbulent century. From a sparkling harborside home in Jaffa in the forties, to the slums of Detroit in the sixties and the stages of contemporary New York theater, each generation must contend with patriarchy within her community and prejudice from outside it. A deft, honest novel that refuses to shun complexity as it explores the costs of love and motherhood.” —Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author

“Too Soon is a multi-generational tale of ambition, war, and reinvention. Its fierce and witty narrators are women, grandmother, mother, and daughter, struggling to plot lives and destinies beyond history’s confines. History here is nations at war; history is embattled families; history is expecting wives and daughters to put marriage before art and duty before desire. Arabella, the granddaughter, is a theatre director who stages Shakespeare’s tragedies as if they were comedies and vice versa. This is exactly what Shamieh does in this book. Simplicities disappear. New interpretations and intricacies emerge. A writer outwits the confines of history.” —Margo Jefferson, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, author of Constructing a Nervous System

“Too Soon is a deeply moving and humorous novel about the Palestinian and Palestinian American experience. Spanning decades and moving back and forth through time, Shamieh’s story explores the lives of three generations of Palestinian women. Through the voices of her unforgettable characters, Shamieh dramatizes a wide range of complex themes, including identity, the meaning of home, war, romance, the creation of art, and the trauma of forced displacement. An exhilarating read.” —Ghassan Zeineddine, author of Dearborn

“An unpredictable and expansive novel of history’s intimate grip on the present. Three generations of Palestinian women fight for their lives, passions, and talents while facing exile, male power, and a corrupt art world. They each strategize survival in specific and recognizable ways, stretching the possible. Betty Shamieh’s characters are real-to-life complex individuals who will keep readers surprised and moved. A book that expands the range of American fiction.” —Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show

“Too Soon is funny, startling, fresh, deeply felt, moving, and full of an important commitment to the complexities of character. It also sings of a subject that is deeply necessary in a way that is new and full of energy. I admire this work.” —Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm

“This rich saga upends received narratives about motherhood and migration.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2024-09-28
Multiple narratives track three Palestinian women from the Middle East to America and back again.

Arabella Hajjar is a New York theater director specializing in hip adaptations of Shakespeare and making a mess of her love life; she refuses to admit to longstanding feelings for her best male friend, who happens to be Jewish. Her Teta Zoya wants to set Arabella up with Aziz Habeeb, a doctor whose grandfather came from Zoya’s childhood village of Ramallah. Harvard-educated and hoping for bigger things in her directing career, Arabella is frustrated by her perception that people are more interested in ethnicity than art: “If you asked either to describe themselves in a word,” Arabella muses of two acquaintances, “they would have the same answer. Palestinian. Mine would be director.” So, when she’s given the opportunity to return to Palestine to direct a gender-swappedHamlet, Arabella is apprehensive. Will her devotion to her work carry her through the complex political and emotional terrain of her return to Ramallah? And will Arabella finally open herself up to more than just theater? Playwright Shamieh, in the novel’s first part, toggles back and forth between Arabella in 2012 and Zoya, beginning just before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the family’s subsequent immigration to Michigan. Part Two interweaves Arabella’s arrival back in Palestine with her mother Naya’s childhood in 1970s Detroit and her adult life in California. Shamieh’s tone—present throughout, but strongest in Arabella’s sections—is confiding and chatty, a Carrie Bradshaw if Carrie had to worry about getting detained at Ben Gurion Airport by Israeli guards for eight hours. But this book isn’t fluffy: Its ethically complex characters carry heavy weights.

Shamieh refuses easy moral lessons, aiming for complexity and nuance with a light, voicey touch.

Kirkus Reviews