A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar

Published on 3 June 2023 at 14:01

by Randa Jarrar (he/him and she/her)


Genre: historical fiction


Representation: bisexual, Egyptian, Muslim, Palestinian

 

Author Representation: Egyptian, fat, Muslim Palestinian, queer

 

Content/Trigger Warning: 


Nidali, the rebellious daughter of an Egyptian-Greek mother and a Palestinian father, narrates the story of her childhood in Kuwait, her teenage years in Egypt (to where she and her family fled the 1990 Iraqi invasion), and her family’s last flight to Texas. Nidali mixes humor with a sharp, loving portrait of an eccentric middle-class family, and this perspective keeps her buoyant through the hardships she encounters: the humiliation of going through a checkpoint on a visit to her father’s home in the West Bank; the fights with her father, who wants her to become a famous professor and stay away from boys; the end of her childhood as Iraq invades Kuwait on her thirteenth birthday; and the scare she gives her family when she runs away from home.

Funny, charming, and heartbreaking, A Map of Home is the kind of book Tristram Shandy or Huck Finn would have narrated had they been born Egyptian-Palestinian and female in the 1970s.

Add comment

Comments

There are no comments yet.

Create Your Own Website With Webador