Over all, I enjoyed this book. There were parts that I sort of skimmed, mainly dealing with her crush on a male doctor she worked with, and their 'relationship' over the phone and email, IM, collaborating on papers. I just didn't care, and the excessive description of his skin or his wrist....eh. I have bad romance novels in a closet somewhere if I want to read that. Not that anything ever happened between them, as far as you can tell. It was a completely UST relationship, if the book is to be believed.
I like the slices of life that she reflected with some of her coworkers. The description of a visit to a coworkers home, a man whose son had just been killed, run over in the street, was touching. Of course, the death of a child is always going to rip at my heart.
My favorite part, though, was her description of Hajj.
She's not a particularly observant Muslim, I guess you would say. Or at least the books gives that impression - she doesn't seem to pray the five obligatory prayers before she takes the job in KSA. She appears to be surprised, over and over by different aspects of the faith, or at least aspects of it as practiced in Saudi.
But her Hajj. You could feel her awe and wonder at being in the House of God. The excitement, the joy that she took away from it. She didn't intend to go on Hajj, it just sort of happened, but I think it changed something for her. She didn't suddenly go out and pull on (willingly, she had to wear it while in Saudi) an abaya and veil. Once she was out of the Kingdom, she discarded her abaya post haste. But I do think it awakened her to another aspect of her faith. Unfortunately, topics like that weren't really covered in the later half of the book, so I don't know in what way, it's just an impression that I took from her descriptions of it.
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