Arabella is a 35-year-old who has had problematic and dysfunctional dating experiences and career. She is now a theatre director in New York and is offered an opportunity to direct a cross-dressing risqué interpretation of a Shakespearean classic. But the performance would be taking place in the West Bank.
Arabelle’s grandmother, Zoya, is desperate to make a match for her granddaughter and finds an eligible Palestinian American doctor, Aziz, who was volunteering in Gaza.
When Arabelle and Aziz meet it reminds Zoya of her own passionate relationship she had with Aziz’s grandfather, a man she only wished she could have been with. But this decision was taken out of her hands as her father had made other arrangements.
Within this story we experience the past and present with families fleeing war-torn Jaffa in 1948, trying to seek out their own ‘American Dream’ to post-9/11 and the emerging shift in relationships as others seek out their own historical culture to find answers
or seek solace.
Too Soon is certainly a talking piece with the current news headlines. It’s a very readable novel which opened my eyes to the experiences of families being forced out of their homes and seeking a new country and having to set down roots and start again. Families go from being wealthy, with good jobs, to having nothing.
Betty Shamieh’s writing shows the generational trauma that ripples through families, with some never really coming to terms with this change. The writing is complex and immersive. It highlights the deeply personal scope of displaced humans and ultimate price they pay for being born at the wrong time and in the wrong place.
Reviewed by Claire Stanley
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE AUTHORBetty Shamieh is the author of 16 plays. Shamieh’s debut novel, Too Soon has been named PEOPLE Magazine’s BOOK OF THE WEEK, the ‘must-read book of 2025’ by the SF CHRONICLE, and a ‘great book to start of a great year’ in OPRAH DAILY.
A graduate of Harvard College and the Yale School of Drama, Shamieh was awarded an NEA/TCG grant to be a playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre. Shamieh was selected as a Clifton Visiting Artist at Harvard and named as a Playwriting Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. Shamieh has taught playwriting at Columbia/Barnard, Denison College, and Marymount Manhattan College. She is a alumni member of New Dramatists. an affiliated artist at the New Group, and a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect.
Recently, she was named the Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at the Classical Theatre of Harlem and a Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford. She was commissioned by Noor Theatre with support from Pop Culture Collab to develop a comic TV pilot, inspired by her play Roar.
0 Comments