The Red Sea Bride

Book excerpt: At a school on the Pacific Ocean, Sylvia meets and falls hopelessly in love with a devastating young Saudi man. He marries her and takes her to Jeddah, a five thousand-year-old city on the Red Sea. There, the unseen world of jinn and angels is as palpable as the sand of the desert. Bats swoop in and out of palm trees, camels graze by the water, talismans are used to ward off the evil eye, but as in all communities, love proves the one true binding force. Sylvia merges into a coterie of Western women married to Saudis, all of whom rely on their hearts and wits to keep an even keel in a world for which they had no preparation. Sylvia tells not just her own story, but those of her friends as well as of Saudi women she came to love as fiercely as her own mother and grandmother. Here is a tale of the passionate human heart and the amazing choices some women make to follow it.