![]() ![]() When 12 year old Nidali (the narrator of this story)asks her mother for another glass of water, her mother replies,"Drink your spit." "May the caves they live in be their eternal dwellings!"Īnd some other good ones that I am too embarrassed to write. Love the expletives the characters use like: 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.įunny, 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. 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 narrates the story of her childhood in Kuwait, her teenage years in Egypt, and her family’s last flight to Texas, offering a humorous, sharp but loving portrait of an eccentric middle-class family. ![]()
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