An aggravatingly beautiful story where form, characters, plot, and sentence level writing is at its peak. A winding toxic, insidious romance between an Egyptian-American woman and an Egyptian man in Cairo

I will be returning to this for the examinations of abusive and how identity complicates these dynamics

“I am wanting the abuse, or, at the very least, accepting it as mine. After years of claiming Arabness as an excuse for what I am—hairy, hard-boned and dirt-skinned, sensual, impulsive, superstitious, nostalgic, full of body-shame and estrangement—I feel I'm earning it at last.”