41. In the Kingdom of Men - Kim Barnes

2012, Alfred A. Knopf

324 pgs.

Written for adults

Finished 9/16/2013

Genre: Historical Fiction/1967

Goodreads Rating: 3.44

My Rating:  Liked it (3.5)

TPPL

Setting: rural Oklahoma but mainly the American Aramco company housing and desert surrounding it in Saudi Arabia (simply called "Arabia" in the book) in 1967

1^st sentence from the prologue: "Here is the first thing you need to know about me: I'm a barefoot girl from red-dirt Oklahoma, and all the marble floors in the world will never change that."

1st sentence from Chapter 1:  "In the beginning  --- these three words my daily bread, recited at the kitchen table in our shack in Shawnee, the bible open in front of me.":

My comments:  I have ups and downs with my reactions to this book. I loved the setting - a mysterious one, for me. Arabia in the 1960's, in the American-based housing commune - certainly nothing I had any prior knowledge about.  The Bedouin.  The animosity.  The "kingdom of men"......  And I was unprepared for the ending, a feeling that left me pleasantly surprised, because it was unexpected and perfect for the story.

Goodreads Review:   1967. Gin Mitchell knows a better life awaits her when she marries hometown hero Mason McPhee. Raised in a two-room shack by her Oklahoma grandfather, a strict Methodist minister, Gin never believed that someone like Mason, a handsome college boy, the pride of Shawnee, would look her way. And nothing can prepare her for the world she and Mason step into when he takes a job with the Arabian American Oil company in Saudi Arabia. In the gated compound of Abqaiq, Gin and Mason are given a home with marble floors, a houseboy to cook their meals, and a gardener to tend the sandy patch out back. Even among the veiled women and strict laws of shariah, Gin’s life has become the stuff of fairy tales. She buys her first swimsuit, she pierces her ears, and Mason gives her a glittering diamond ring. But when a young Bedouin woman is found dead, washed up on the shores of the Persian Gulf, Gin’s world closes in around her, and the one person she trusts is nowhere to be found. 

   Set against the gorgeously etched landscape of a country on the cusp of enormous change, In the Kingdom of Men abounds with sandstorms and locust swarms, shrimp peddlers, pearl divers, and Bedouin caravans—a luminous portrait of life in the desert.