This book is exactly what I was hoping for: a heartfelt, sumptuously written account of one woman's life.
There was more about motherhood than I cared to read, but I enjoyed how she made her father appear so vividly on the page.
The musings on life and death are poignant yet realistic and even quite funny at times. The author played with time by shuffling events around to suit her narrative, making it a memoir and thus an example of how time and memory interact.
My favorite were her thoughts on creativity and the writing life which were sprinkled throughout.
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Honestly, I wasn't too much into this at the beginning. But it was so good by the end. It was heartbreaking and I was crying at the end because it his so hard. Beautifully written and powerful. ( )

Loved this book -many parts of it read like poetry to me. (I marked a lot of passages!)
Years ago I attended an author presentation by Diana Abu-Jaber and found her delightful so I think I felt a special connection to her story.
I've had Crescent in my "to read" bookcase forever - I think now is the time! ( )

This was my first Net Galley ARC. Thank you! I saw a meme the other day on FB that talked about how sometimes when you finished a book you wished that the author was your good friend and you could call him or her up anytime and talk about anything. This is that book. I go back a ways with Abu-Jaber. She spent part of her childhood an hour away in Syracuse, NY and her first memoir, The Language of Baklava: A Memoir, set there in part, was a community-wide read in my hometown, culminating with a reading from her at our local community college. I went on from there to read some of her fiction, including Crescent, which was outstanding, and Origin, set back in Syracuse, a place that was both familiar and mysterious with her treatment.

Her writing resonates with me in a way few other authors have managed. Her ethnic experience can't be that different from millions of other Americans, in fact I imagine it must be similar in some ways to the experience of my aunt by marriage's Greek family that settled in Syracuse. But she describes something exotic, something the rest of us will envy. She writes about her journey from ambivalence toward parenthood through a positively gripping 48 hours waiting to learn if her wish will be granted, to the first wondrous days of becoming a family.

I miss my own mother; more pointedly than on any given day. I want to ask her more detailed questions about their emotional journey to becoming parents. I have the facts...but not the feelings. I curse my horrible memory; I want to hear the family stories one more time, to know I must commit them to memory. I'm jealous that the death of her father was a process, a slow unraveling, not a sudden tearing apart.

Most of all, I am enthralled by the life that her prose gives to feelings, thoughts, even the smallest details of every day life. They come alive; I think I can feel what she feels, see what she sees. I've spent barely an hour or two in Winter Park, FL, yet when she is there, I am there. It is exactly the place. I suggest you take the trip with her as well...you won't regret it. ( )

Memoir, biograpy... Jordanian, Muslim, Irish, Catholic... Food narrative? It's a list of fragmented episodes of a woman's self-discovery. What is discovered about the self? Simply nothing and everything and that one who is riddled with choice can simply be free. Abu-Jaber's writing is beautiful and she brings to the page pairings and vocabulary that has made me jot and look up. There were suggestions of things people might eat or have eaten, but the process is dreamlike and memory driven so readers cannot cook along with her. It seemed like Abu-Jaber didn't want to write this book because doing so would mean her father was dead and the finality of this is palpable. Abu-Jaber didn't offer a balance of detail regarding the people in her life. So much lies in the periphery. This book did make me cry as I read of her father's diminished state and peace there within. Overall, it read like a set of journal notes, or rough draft and organization is needed to clarify the fuzziness in time and personal development. ( )