Library Journal
Young Jammana, a principal character of Hamilton’s eloquent first novel, possesses a familial gift that enables her to experience others’ memories. Her grandfather displays an equally intuitive gift, allowing him to glimpse the future. Because of the mixed blessings their ancestral aptitude begets, they are, along with two others, outsiders in their fictional village.
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The Boulder Weekly
Masha Hamilton is a poet. She brings the desert to life; its sounds of bracelets jingling and sheep baying, its heat, its many secrets. She creates characters you can put your arms around. Staircase of a Thousand Steps is the translation of an entire culture. Its pages smell of jasmine and freshly baked bread. It transports you to a warm, earthen rooftop amidst a gentle evening breeze. It is here that it asks you this question: Are you living your own life, or do fear and expectations enslave you? Do you even know?
–Lynn T. Theodose
Publisher’s Weekly
Hamilton is a natural storyteller: she weaves past and present artfully together, the narrative moves at a good clip and the mysticism throughout is rendered believably. Readers eager for a much different take on small-town hurts and rivalries will be intrigued by how these elements play out in this sheltered corner of the world.
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The Seattle Press
Masha Hamilton writes with flowing ease and rippling words that are hard to turn away from. She lived in the area for many years and seems to have a marvelous insight into the minds and hearts of the Palestinians, especially their women.
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Associated Press
Beautifully written first novel…her experience comes through in the book’s details. Steam rises off dirt floors made shiny with sheep’s blood, helicopters growl overhead, the scent of dung mixes with that of jasmine… Faridah’s fate and that of the village unfold in elegant language as Hamilton compellingly writes about love and betrayal.
This is what fiction does sometimes. It makes you the outlaw. It makes you question your assumptions about yourself. It makes you question your boundaries and tests what you might and might not do, your pieties, your hypocrisies, your simple repetition of phrases that make you feel safe and good, in the moral know, in the political know. People are full of contradictions. That, to me, is the central truth we learn our whole lives long. Bad people do good things. Good people do bad things. If you want to fuel the plots of your stories, to make your characters believable and intriguing, make them contradictory. Reveal who they think they aren’t. Show us their fatal flaws.
Tucson Weekly
Each scene is meticulously described in sensual terms. The taste of bread cooked with sweet basil, the oily smell of a plant you cannot wash off, the feel of the air in a room seeming to vibrate, and the sound of rain drumming a hopeless, warning melody awaken all the senses.
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Booklist
Focusing on themes of love, betrayal, friendship and duty, Hamilton shows how each generation’s decisions create a web that ensnares the next. The prose is simple but elegant, and subtle interweaving of the mystical and the mundane makes the novel delightfully compelling.
The Arizona Daily Sun
Hamilton is a graceful writer and terrific storyteller. The parched desert life Hamilton describes, complete with cowboy bandannas, strong coffee, dust devils and a colorful collision of tan and ochre in the desert heat–”no other colors could survive”–will make Hamilton’s Middle East seem as familiar as our own Southwestern deserts. Staircase of a Thousand Steps is a thoroughly absorbing novel.
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable it is nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.
Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive.
The Rocky Mountain News
The rich diversity of characters and the poetic use of language add freshness to an ageless tale of human betrayal and small town pettiness. (The) author reminds me of Naguib Mahfouz, in her ability to capture the dichotomy between the mystical and superstitious with the hard, practical realism of desert life.
–Joan Hinkemeyer
The point is to be as honest as possible in every sentence. I wanted to write a work that was completely exposed. I didn’t want to hide anything. I wanted to break down for myself the boundary between living and writing as much as I could.
Booksense Review
Set in ’60s Jordan, Hamilton has hit on two universal truths: That children never believe they will be as old as their elders, and that the way our relatives are in our youth is how we will always remember them. She captures the myths of a culture in dramatic style. Wonderful!
–Laura Hansen, Bookin’ It, Little Falls, MN
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers.
Kliatt
Hamilton drew upon her experiences as an AP correspondent in the Middle East to write a first novel that reveals in fascinating depth a desert culture in Jordan just before the 1967 war with Israel.
–Maureen K. Griffin
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I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to
(wo)man.
Harriet Klausner review
In 1966, eleven year old Jammana struggles with her ability to see the memories of the past, as seen through the eyes of others. Currently, she accompanies her mother Rafa on a visit to the latter’s hometown of Ein Fadr where the same families can trace their roots to Abraham and Allah’s strict rules.
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we are running
running and
time is clocking us
from the edge like an only
daughter.
our mothers stream before us,
cradling their breasts in their
hands.
oh pray that what we want
is worth this running,
pray that what we’re running
toward
is what we want.
1). Although the book is set in a highly politicized region, the novel isn’t political. What does Hamilton gain by focusing her book on character and plot rather than politics? How would you define a “political novel”?
2). Medicine plays a critical role in this novel, as does the theme of healing. What wounds run throughout this community, and what, in the end, is the source of (and the process through which) the characters find ways to heal?
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1. The essence of this book is in its title. Distance exists in the political landscape of this novel as well as in Caddie’s life. What are some of the historical and cultural differences that create distance between the Palestinians and the Jews in this story? How does creating distance influence Caddie’s relationship with Marcus? her professional colleagues? her friends? her community? herself?
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