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The Arrogant Years

One Girl's Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn

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The Arrogant Years

By: Lucette Lagnado
Narrated by: Joyce Bean
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“[Lagnado writes] in crystalline yet melodious prose.”
—New York Times

Lucette Lagnado’s acclaimed, award-winning The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (“[a] crushing, brilliant book” —New York Times Book Review) told the powerfully moving story of her Jewish family’s exile from Egypt. In her extraordinary follow-up memoir, The Arrogant Years, Lagnado revisits her first years in America, and describes a difficult coming-of-age tragically interrupted by a bout with cancer at age 16. At once a poignant mother and daughter story and a magnificent snapshot of the turbulent ’60s and ’70s, The Arrogant Years is a stunning work of memory and resilience that ranges from Cairo to Brooklyn and beyond—the unforgettable true story of a remarkable young woman’s determination to push past the boundaries of her life and make her way in the wider world.

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My enjoyment of this fascinating story was, unfortunately, marred by the narrator's mispronunciation of Egyptian Arabic, French and even English words to the extent that she even mispronounced the author's name. I have lived in Cairo for almost sixty years, arriving at the time of Nasser but the story was so evocative of an age that had not entirely gone. I will read it again in book form.

Great story; poor narratiom

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Intensely disliked the robotic narration, the mispronunciation of French and Arabic and even English at times. Overall found the book tedious and repetitive and could not believe such major events as the 1967 and 1973 wars were not mentioned. The earthquake in Cairo in 1992 was grossly exaggerated . Most of thee characters were underdeveloped and the central relationship between mother and daughter never really felt real to. I listened to the end in the hopes of improvement but my hopes were not realized.

I quite enjoyed descriptions of the early years in Cairo

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