'Ezza Agha Malak’s new novel, What Have You Done With Your Kids, Dad?, touches upon some particularly painful issues as it describes the abusive relationship of an overbearing, Muslim man seen thru the eyes of his own young children. The progressive breakdown of the couple means more than the separation of two adults with children. Not only do these young ones have to face the terrible psychological assault upon their own mother, but they also have to reconcile themselves with the loss of their father and with his wrongdoing. No longer a sought after, loving, role model, their father has become a repulsive figure symbolizing the suffering of their mother whom they strive to protect. When the mother and her two children flee a devastated Lebanon at war in 2006, they all but abandon their cultural roots behind for an unknown and uncertain future in France. Ezza Agha Malak’s emotionally brutal novel owes much to some brilliant predecessors that also analyze father/child relations, like Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Sacred Night, or Dominique Fernandez’s In the Hand of the Angel. Agha Malak paints her characters extremely well, and we do feel for the young hero.
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