Gardens of Water by Alan Drew

Alan Drew went to Turkey in 1999 to teach English and happened to arrive just before the devastating Istanbul earthquake. He ended up volunteering in tent cities set up by the Americans, who along with other foreigners came in to launch rescue operations, using technology and resources which the Turkish government so desperately lacked. Out of this experience and his two years stay Drew wrote Gardens of Water. Having lived in Istanbul six years myself, I was curious to see how someone could write a novel with its core characters from another country. The story concerns a Kurdish family and their experiences during and after the earthquake, and their relationship with an American family. The teenage daughter of the Kurdish family falls in love with the American teenage son, who (typically enough) has learning disabilities and mood swings and is on medication for these ailments.
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While Drew moves his characters along and his description of Istanbul is evocative, the motives that drive the characters are one-dimensional and ultimately false. The Kurdish father hates Americans for their tacit support of the Turkish government’s ruthless tactics against the Kurds in Southeastern Turkey, and clings to his hate regardless of the American father’s selfless ministrations to him and his family in the tent city.

My experience with the Middle Eastern culture was of how warm the people are, and if you even share food or drink tea with others, you create a bond that is not easily broken. The daughter is obsessed with her father’s favoring her younger brother, yet that favoring of the boy child is so strong throughout the culture that all family members participate; it’s not just something imposed by the father. My final impression of the book was of the author manipulating the story to illustrate cultural conflicts, not fully realizing the characters and letting the story emerge from them, from their world.