I read Rolling Blackouts in black and white. Our review copy was a gray-toned paperback with one burst of tantalizing color pages stapled near the back of the book.
I was happy to read it, even in gray, but over the course of Sarah Glidden’s detailed narrative of traveling through Iraq, Syria, and Turkey with Seattle Globalist reporters, I found myself returning to the color section more and more. The scene depicted is extremely mundane—people sitting and answering interview questions, uncomfortably close on couches, in a living room in Damascus.
But despite the sketchy border crossings, the refugee camps, the arguments, and the soul-searching I’d seen in the previous pages, it was these glossy ones I thought about the most. I admired the detailed watercolor renderings of the scarves the women wore around their faces. In the blanched stone houses, the scarves were sometimes the only vibrant color in the room.
