Malaka Gharib's graphic memoir takes us through her adolescence when she spends summers in Egypt with her father instead of at home in California with her (Filipino-American) mother. I added her mother's national identifier not because it has a tremendous bearing on this part of Gharib's story, but to underscore that young Malaka is navigating multiple racial, ethnic, and national identities at a life stage when there's a lot to figure out about yourself, even if you're coming of age in a homogenous environment that matches your looks and culture and those of your family members. (nb junior high was an emotional shitshow for me from which I may never fully recover)

We join Gharib in Egypt and later other Middle Eastern countries, spending time with her father Maged and his girlfriend, eventually wife, Hala. This isn't so much a memoir of seminal moments in Gharib's life, as it is a de-spooling of her summers, which she sometimes experienced a stranger in her own family. Her father's increasing financial success, which means moving to more conservative cities, necessitates or coincides with Hala becoming more overtly religious. Because she travels back and forth between the US and isn't raising children, Gharib's freedoms aren't as constrained as her stepmother's, and at first she isn't cognizant of what life might be like for her parents and their SO's, because adolescent. She gains maturity--and distance--as the memoir progresses, taking us with her to care with more nuance.

I'm also taken with Gharib's illustrations. I love how much she does with wavy lines and color textures.