Crescent

This vibrant, engrossing Devine Saga celebrates the indominable women of the Lebanon, from differing denominations and sectors, whose eternal heroism triumphs over so much devilish danger.

Crescent is the story of four bright young Lebanese women, each poised for good lives in a good place, who are already friends—laughing and gossiping and whispering secrets, as they unpack to begin their new lives as college girls at the American University of Beirut. Each is beautiful in her own way, and each has great expectations of grand lives with husbands like movie stars, and gorgeous children, and lives of goodness, grace, and fun, fun, fun.

And why not? It’s the late 1950s, and Beirut—this fabulous, glamorous “Paris of the East”—is one of the world’s best places to be young and blessed. It’s not bad even to be old and frail here, in this cosmopolitan and sophisticated site that is now remembered as once being like paradise.

But destiny has surprises for each of them—not only our quartet of hopeful women but also the millions of Lebanese who, like them, are about to fall off an international precipice that will turn beautiful Beirut from heaven to hell.

How could that happen, and how could these young women still somehow grow and even thrive through lives of war and grief and death to many they will hold dear? How, too, could they help one another survive and, like stars in the dark Lebanese skies, remain steadfast lifelong friends?

Each so different, but each in her own way, so alike in the desire for faith and hope and love.

Camilla, the blonde Christian babe, can pout and smile at the same time, which somehow drives men of all ages wild. She may have inherited that sultry charisma genetically from her mother, for Nirvana is a chanteuse and belly dancer renowned throughout the Lebanon. But Camilla has, as it is so often said, a good heart.

Leila is the aristocratic Palestinian from one of the oldest and richest Arab families who once seemed fated to rule from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. She is brilliant and very cool but in some ways desires to be lean and mean—not loved maybe, but respected. She wore tight jeans many years before anyone else and considers herself the leader of their pack, and of any pack.

Fatima is odd-girl-out—a religious Shia Muslim from a poor village in South Lebanon, here on scholarship, as the school tries outreach to the despised and mostly illiterate Muslim sect. Her dream is to open a school for Shia Muslim women—that is, before she marries the man of her father’s choice. She scores the highest of the girls on every intelligence test and excels at sweetness as well as smarts.

Anne is an American, daughter of a longtime American University of Beirut professor and his non-practicing Jewish wife who longs to be back in New York. At her father’s request, Anne befriended Fatima, and spends much time being peacemaker among the others. Anne plans on becoming a doctor and opening a clinic, maybe in Fatima’s village. She loves the Middle East and would never claim to be the group’s leader, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Together, their intertwined stories are vivid representations of the mosaic that is Lebanon in our lifetimes, a site of sadness but heroism, of martyrs and mourning mothers, of a place that, just as it seems to be as lost as Atlantis, surprises with its tales of compassion and sacrifice which are proof that the humanistic Lebanese spirit is still alive. Ah, Lebanon!