"Haddad's The Book of Queens packs in a century of Levantine cataclysms ... [It] includes within its scope the Armenian genocide, the Palestinian Nakba, the Lebanese Civil War, Lebanon's intifada against Syrian 'tutelage'–as it is termed in Arabic–and Syria's (unrelated) descent into civil war ... [T]he convergence of the novel's protagonists and historical paroxysms of violence is explosive and often makes storytelling both suspenseful and emotionally affecting. That all the protagonists are female enhances these qualities because in this story, as in life, when people are caught up in war or oppressed due to their national/ ethnic/ religious identity, the women and girls among them endure the same outrages as their male counterparts–and then some. But they fight back. And Haddad, long known for her feminism, is keen to demonstrate the suffering, stoicism, and resistance of Qayah, Qana, Qadar, and Qamar ... [A] laudable and often a poignant channeling of several violent and disruptive historical events into the trajectory of a single Armenian-Arab family. It is a family in which each generation produces at least one headstrong girl-cum-woman, the kind who tries valiantly to lodge a splint in the maw of this genocide or that Nakba or the other civil war intent on devouring her and her loved ones."–PopMatters
