It tells the "true" story of a Muslim family who lived through the Hurricane in New Orleans. While his wife and children even just leave the city in good time, head of the family Zeitoun is back in town and experienced there the storm and its aftermath. Eagerly we follow Zeithouns excursions by land flooded city and wonders if and how the family will be together again.
Eben those forays into an evacuated, flooded city make the best passages in the book. The reader is guided in a city that he so far could not imagine. The scenes are often grotesque and open up an entirely new perspective.
Demgegebenüber are the many other intentions, which seem to follow the book Dave Eggers. The story is always recognized as a true, but not in order simply to tell a "true" story, but to show her how wrong were handled in New Orleans with the storm and how Americans think wrongly about Muslim fellow citizens. That is why the figures to clot types. The Muslim family Zeitoun must be a model family, so exemplary that it is implausible. This exemplary nature of the family, which is always set by the author to prejudices against people of Muslim faith in relation disqualified history as a "true" story. For a "true" story of the relationship of the main characters is another, but also to other figures, too smoothly.
As a novel, without the right to "truth" and the index finger raised, this story would have worked better if possible. In its present form can convince neither fiction nor as Reportage "Zeitoun". Rather, the book will stop halfway and can therefore neither the demands of the one nor the claims sufficient to the other genre.