The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem: A Novel Kindle Edition

At the beginning, I found this book to be too much detail. After a while it became a fast read. The story is a very sad story. It is about three generations of women who marry men that don't love them and men who regret not going after their true loves. They allow others to walk all over them and religion to dictate their lives. The story now deals with Luna and her daughter Gabriela who never get along with each other until Luna is dying. When Luna dies Gabriela regrets not giving her mother the love that is needed. Gabriela learns of their history through grandmother, great aunt and two aunts how the great-grandmother, grandmother and mother are cursed with marriages without love. As a result of this Gabriela wants to break that cycle and keep the man that truly loves her. Personally I think this is still common where we have the notion that we are supposed to get married and have children; however, we never really think through what happens after the wedding. Today we have choices and if you don't think something is right in your relationship you have the choice.

Ok

I SO wanted to love this book. It's an engrossing story about a culture that most people know nothing of -- the ladino speaking Sephardic culture of Jerusalem -- largely taking place in the period before Israeli independence in 1947. It's a brisk read, but I can't help feeling something's been lost in the translation from Hebrew to English. The pacing bogs down in the middle and it starts to feel repetitive. Also, there is little in the way of truly understanding the internal dialogue of the characters which feel very uni dimensional. I am thinking that I may actually like the Netflix series better! We'll see...

I enjoyed most of this book,but it gotstuck in the middle, and I almost stopped reading it. When the book comes back to life, it ends well.

I have just purchased The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem and after each page I read it falls out of the book. I don’t believe you had this in mind when you printed the book. Please respond.Thank you,Gary Nixon

Una historia familiar, con personajes entrañables y un relato armonioso, suave y profundamente emotivo. Cómo me gustaría l versión en español, la leería de nuevo, varias veces. Una novela Bellisima.

I liked the book for the most part! I don’t know much about everything happening politically in Jerusalem throughout the decades the book covers, so some things may have been lost on me. I did make every attempt to stop and look up the history as I read just to better educate myself.I think this may have lead to my confusion with EVERY Single characters’ age throughout the story. In fact half way through the book I started over skimming through and highlighting in yellow anything that would help me figure out how old everyone was. I continued doing this throughout the rest of the book. And this revealed some mistakes! Time lines were not matching up or making any sense! That was one of the more annoying things -not knowing how old anyone is at any time while things are happening or how they were trying to make mid 30 year olds sound like they were in their 70’s.I loved the stories about the 4 different women and their retrospective husband’s lives, but the stories were often cut short. Too many important story lines were just left with no closure. No ending. The writing was very choppy and I feel like there were characters we should have learned much more about or at least learned what happened to them instead of never mentioning them again.I’m glad I read it, but I’m underwhelmed. The ending felt really lazy, hurried and slapped on.

So, the book is nothing like the show. If you’re looking for that, you’ll be shocked how much the stories diverge for pretty much every single character. That said, Luna is consistently frustrating, both in show and book. She’s selfish and self-centered, and I find her relationship with Rosa and everyone’s constant enabling really irritating. That poor woman Rosa, never an opportunity for agency for her. I liked the book, as some others said, it had slow points. But it’s an interesting generational tale.

I couldn’t stop reading it, one day I read for twelve hours straight. As a Spanish speaker and enthusiast of everything Jewish, every detail, the Ladino phrases, the names of Sephardi dishes, the description of characters, their feelings, thoughts, the description of politic views, politic movements, small details of life like the use of the “privy” or the room with air ventilation to keep the food fresh, all so beautiful and painful, for me specially Rosa, how it hurt… the only but I give to the book, and the reason of giving only four stars, is because I felt that the ending was rushed and something didn’t make sense. Gabriela’s attitude didn’t make sense and then some issues were left unresolved, left as “nada” in my view. I won’t enter into details so as not to spoil the book. But in general it was a beautiful tale.

I love to read a book with history and romance. Israel before Independence war, and Sefardi culture. A family like any other.

Great piece of history and anthropology, the story of early Israel, the Sephardic community. The story describes personal and communal relationships especially conflicts, filial piety, parental control over their children, sibling love and rivalry.

A sad book in general but a fascinating look at Jewishness. I continued to the end. Not a book to uplift the spirits. Feel pleased have read this to understand more about lifestyles of Jews of which I previously knew virtually nothing. Understanding brings enlightenment.

This book was quite interesting. It did feel a little long at times. Luna was a bit of a frustrating character at times.