Celestial Bodies

I realized pretty quickly that this is not a book I could passively listen to as I worked or went about my day - I really had to focus on what was happening in the story or find myself at a total loss as to who these characters were and what was going on. (This is not a fault of the audio narrator, who was excellent; rather, the structure of the book is non-linear, and set up in vignettes that focus on individual characters, building the story of this extended Omani family over the whole of the book.)

I have never read anything set in Oman, and did enjoy hearing about this family against the background of the disintegrating-then-abolished slave trade in Oman, of family and expectations for their grown children (in that way it reminded me a bit of Good Girls Marry Doctors, though those expectations showed up differently for almost every person, male and female, in the story), and the women did appear to have some agency in choosing their partners, careers, children's names, etc., even if their families (and sometimes even their own selves) were not pleased about any of it.

From reading other reviews I see the print copy had a family tree at the beginning, which obviously the audio didn't have, but I did glance over the free page of this study guide whenever I needed help remembering the characters' relationships to each other and a short summary of what was going on, and found it helpful.