Short and very sweet

how do you / have faith / when genocide / is at your doorstep / and you are not home / to answer it? / how do you / surrender / when you never had / control / in the first place?

A raw and timely collection. My favorites include Falasteen, On Our Way, Healthy, and Amal. 
Some poems felt more like short rants or speeches that happened to have line-breaks, but I’m no poetry expert, so maybe I would understand the art in those more if I heard them read aloud or saw their layout in a physical book. 

I started this for the TransRightsReadathon but couldn’t get another loan from my library until Pride Month - auspicious timing!
This was an often difficult but very clarifying and brutally honest memoir. It was so hard to read not only about the bullying and discrimination Al-Kadhi faced in every community, but also how they bullied in turn, and even how they came to accept that they didn’t deserve the mistreatment they’d faced (especially from their parents)
It was bittersweetly beautiful to follow this journey, and healing to hear how they came to understanding and forgiveness towards so many. I found it especially impressive that they not only continued to find new community, but faith in a healing Sufi practice as well. However, it does seem like they still have some anti-Arab hate to unlearn. For example, why claim that Moroccans don’t speak Arabic? Of course, it’s a different dialectic than the Arabic spoken in Iraq, but that doesn’t mean it’s not Arabic…
Overall, I’m glad I was able to come back to this book, and I hope to read more from Al-Kadhi!

Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”

Each chapter is told by a different character, all related to one woman, and after every chapter, as we meet new generations and see the lineage continue, I longed to know more about the character we left and loved each glimpse we receive from their children. While I sometimes felt we left a characters chapter too soon, I still couldn’t put the book down, I was totally engrossed in each new story. A heart wrenching look at generational trauma and a beautiful story of the importance of family history and the healing of finding community and understanding.

I loved Sarah Dessen when I was young, and having recently seen the movie adaptation, I had to return to the text. It was a fun and nostalgic read! Though some things really place the book in the time it was written (especially the casual ableism in calling strangers “crazies,” etc.) it was also a good time capsule (no social media, coughing through second-hand smoke at clubs, home-phones, and more) and a welcome escape to the often insure but also beautiful time between the end of high school and the start of university. I saw a lot of my young and too-judgmental self in Auden, and I love how she and almost every character around her got to grow through this story. 

I love this trilogy so much! Read this as an ebook a while ago, but needed an audiobook and was so glad to find it immediately available on my Libby. 
Sometimes I finish a romance and am not convinced the couple would make it more than a month or so, but not Chloe and Red.
I can picture how they’d thrive during COVID stay at home orders, and I have to believe they’d both still be masking to protect their community and especially those with disabilities around them. 

The only thing I really hated were the Harry Potter references… for such an otherwise progressive book, ick. 

An interesting read, chosen by my partner on a road trip. Some of the advice was contradictory, and like some similar self-help longevity books, over-simplified. Alcohol is a killer, but you should drink red wine every night. Sun exposure can age and cause you cancer, but you should get a lot of sun exposure for the vitamin D. Stress is terrible for your health, but many of those interviewed survived traumatic wars and periods of poverty and other intense stresses.
Maybe it’s inherent in interviewing people who have lived so long, but the descriptions of the centenarians made me cringe with how they were othered and exoticised. 
It also felt a little rude, the number of times the author was invited to stay for a meal and refused. I was curious how much research he did into each culture before he arrived at each location.
Finally, super weird to hear the Seventh Day Adventist lifestyle praised without criticism or much context at all. The most bland and example was talking about Kellogg without mentioning any of his eugenicist beliefs! 

I found the writing beautiful and was totally captivated by the stories, but deeply disappointed that a cop was the star of this book. After reading such detailed and honest stories discussing Orientalism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination, the way fatphobia and ableism were left under-interrogated left me a little shocked.

Especially after Marcus recognized his own practices in how the IOF treated him, I hoped he would return home to deeply reflect on his work and leave his role, but no. A cop is still somehow the hero of that community in the end.

This was cute! Took me a long time because it wasn’t in the mood for a RomCom when I started it, and then the library hold line was long, but I’m glad I came back to it!
I liked Samira and loved getting to know her friends, with a few exceptions. Lara really makes no sense. She wants Samira to be with Hakeem so much so that she takes Samiras phone to call him to “rescue them” when they have a flat tire, then as soon as he’s done changing it out, she demands they leave immediately, not letting Samira and Hakeem chat at all. Then she almost ruins things with Menem, but faces no consequences for it? I would love a Jane Austen Emma-esque story on Lara to watch her grow up next!

The white co-workers also fell a little flat…. I’m dreaming of reading Arab stories that aren’t forced to explain every cultural thing. The zaghrouta shouldn’t have to be defined twice in the novel and in a glossary at the end. It felt like Samira’s white friends and colleagues were just a transparent device to explain Arab culture to non-Arab readers. Search engines are free! I even looked up some Australian sayings I wasn’t familiar with while reading. Or, I could figure it out myself. What is a cadetship outside military contexts? I can infer! Let people learn without disrupting the flow of the book. I doubt that was the authors fault though, or at least not her choice alone.
Finally, I agree with other reviews that the love triangle aspect didn’t feel totally developed.

However, I didn’t want her to like Hakeem in that way, so I’m a little happy it didn’t fully go there. Still, that plot line, as well as some others, were resolved too quickly or dropped without explanation.

I really didn’t enjoy this look into such a monsters head, but it was interesting to see more of the history of the Hunger Games. Would be more interested in reading how Tigris moved from a Snow to a resistance coordinator, but not sure that transition would be one I could handle reading either.