DesiPundit

Niranjana reviews Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea

The women portrayed in Girls of Riyadh belong to the “velvet class�, as Saudi Arabia’s elite is known. Other than wealth and social status, they also have in common a dream of romance, hoping to marry the first love of their lives. But the men they meet foil these plans, taking advantage all too often of the privileges accorded to them in this society to behave in the most dishonorable of ways. There is, for instance, the man who declines to marry his fiancee on the grounds that she went “too-far� with him — thus condemning her to a half-life in Saudi society. The man who dumps his girlfriend because his mother tells him to do so. The one who has a mistress back home, whom he intends to continue seeing even after his marriage. And so on.