Thoughts That Don’t Rhyme

Thoughts That Don’t Rhyme is an uplifting, invigorating read for the cynical and disillusioned at heart; even the most declared eternal optimist can still find some relief in these pages. With a confessional, poetic flair, Marwa Farouq renders a conversation with the universe and reader. She engages in an extremely personal, casual dialogue about her childhood, newly forged/lost relationships (platonic & romantic), ensuing divorce, raising a daughter as a single parent, and the pressures of life as an Egyptian Muslim woman. She finds independence through a well composed career, as an international consultant, and her everlasting goals for improving on a happier living. Farouq invokes her dogma enough to guide her audience through her daily affirmations of Allah but not excessively to isolate them from their own sense of spirituality and well-being.

Thoughts That Don’t Rhyme is ultimately about being separate and yet united on both a global scale, like a bombing in Iraq or the coming of Election Day in Egypt, and a local scale, like a bedtime reading of Elizabeth Gilbert or cruising in a car with your first love. Marwa Farouq creates this collaborative text, where she deciphers all her struggles and insecurities in a guileless and affecting manner, so her readers can also feel compelled to commit to a similar mission of development. Though the tone is similar to an epistolary novel or a collection of short stories in travelogue form, at times the tediousness of recounting events with so many trivial details creates an overall lag, inadvertently slowing down the course of the book. Despite some technical issues with font, sentence structures, and repetition, this author writes a smashing debut worth the effort.