Decolonization's effect on Morocco is the subject of Watch Us Dance, the heartfelt second installment of a planned trilogy based on author Leïla Slimani's family. The first volume, In the Country of Others, spanned the mid-1940s to mid-1950s. This novel, starting in 1968, revisits the Belhaj family when Morocco is no longer a protectorate of France. Amine, the native-born patriarch, has grown rich from his farm and is asked to join the Rotary Club, where "bourgeois Moroccans mingled with members of the European community" and acted as if "colonization had never been anything more than a misunderstanding." French-born wife Mathilde, meanwhile, suspects him of cheating and gets revenge by skimming off some of the farm's earnings for herself, "a reward for her sacrifices."
Slimani (Sex and Lies; Adèle) seamlessly shifts perspectives among the four family members, each perspective captivating in its own way, to show the strains on the couple's marriage and the developments in their children's lives, from daughter Aïcha--who studies medicine in Strasbourg and falls in love with Mehdi, an economics major who dislikes white people yet "had only one ambition in life: to become like them"--to son Selim, who disappears when he takes up with a group of hippies. If Watch Us Dance, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, doesn't have the dramatic sparkle of its predecessor, it offers a powerful portrait of a country and family in transition and characters bombarded by prejudice, as when a haughty stylist says to Aïcha, "We don't usually do this kind of hair." In countries, as within families, transitions are never easy. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer