Lucette Lagnado’s second memoir that mainly deals with her mother left me cold. With the scarcity of dialogue, the book becomes a series of “telling” rather than “showing” episodes, causing the reader to feel distanced. Too much ground was covered between the sections about growing up as a Jewish child in Cairo along with illnesses of the writer and both her parents and adjusting to their immigration to America. Despite an attempt to tie things together at the end, the title The Arrogant Years never gets satisfactorily explained.

A Visit with Lucette Lagnado, Author of The Arrogant Years (October 12, 2011) – YouTube