Description
Burning with the fires of hope and possibility, AS LONG AS THE LEMON TREES GROW will sweep you up and never let you go.
Salama Kassab was a pharmacy student when the cries for freedom broke out in Syria. She still had her parents and her big brother; she still had her home. She was even supposed to be meeting a boy to talk about marriage.
Now Salama volunteers at a hospital in Homs, helping the wounded who flood through the doors. She knows that she should be thinking about leaving, but who will help the people of her beloved country if she doesn't? With her heart so conflicted, her mind has conjured a vision to spur her to action. His name is Khawf, and he haunts her nights with hallucinations of everything she has lost.
But even with Khawf pressing her to leave, when she crosses paths with Kenan, the boy she was supposed to meet on that fateful day, she starts to doubt her resolve in leaving home at all. Soon, Salama must learn to see the events around her for what they truly are not a war, but a revolution and decide how she, too, will cry for Syria's freedom.
Review
We hear little about the situation in Syria in the news anymore, but this story gives an insight into what began in reaction to a tyrannical regime in 2011.
We see the situation through the eyes of 17-year-old pharmacy student Salama. Being at the hospital she is quickly given more responsibility to help save the patients - many of them children - who have been bombed, shot, or even poisoned by the Syrian army who will stop at nothing to quell the uprising. She hears the voice of fear in the form of the imaginary Khawf, who is telling her to pay her way out of Syria to save herself and her pregnant sister, Layla.
But it isn’t until Salama meets and starts falling in love with Kenan, the boy her mother was trying to set her up to marry, that she realises that if she is to have a future at all she must convince him that they have to leave, and take his two younger siblings with them. With the army closing in and killing all resistors the journey across the Mediterranean to a new life begins…
This is an at times brutal look at the human consequences of war, and is an important story of the terrible situation in Syria. With themes of war, survival, love, family and the importance of country it is an ideal novel for readers aged 15 and above.
Reviewed by Rob
