Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Zaher's hypnotic debut, an obsessive Palestinian woman flees her oppressive homeland for Manhattan and employs increasingly unorthodox methods to teach English at the private school where she works. The unnamed narrator lives comfortably on an allowance from the estate of her parents, who died years earlier in a car accident. She fills her free time with elaborate ablutions and stays up late cleaning and organizing her apartment, to the point that she's so exhausted during class she can't stay on her feet. Disregarding the standard curriculum in favor of harsh life lessons (love is akin to being "taken hostage"), she gives her students bizarre assignments such as extracting confessions from their family members. She chalks up her strange behavior to a coin she remembers swallowing as a child, which she imagines remains lodged in her back. Zaher's writing is deeply arresting, especially when her narrator is energized by her newfound sense of self-possession in New York, where she walks the streets wearing a "violent" and "sexual" perfume and carries a Birkin bag, which thrillingly transforms her into an object of desire ("I came from a place where a bag could never have power, where only violence spoke. And suddenly I had something that others wanted to possess, I was a woman who others wanted to embody"). It's a tour de force. Agent: Monika Woods, Triangle House. (July)
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Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT An unnamed young, rich, beautiful, meticulously fashionable Palestinian immigrant is the narrator of Zaher's wondrous first novel. The protagonist teaches, with unconventional methods, at a middle school for underprivileged boys in Brooklyn, New York, all while she tries to put down roots in the United States. The narrator, who is devoted to and proud of her Hermès Birkin bag, soon befriends a well-dressed homeless man and joins with him in a scheme to buy the super-expensive and highly exclusive handbags and resell them to the kinds of people whom the Hermès store personnel would never allow to buy a Birkin directly. As the novel unfolds, luxury goods and clothing seem to take a toll on the narrator, however, and she ends up stripping down to her skin and turning her apartment into a nature preserve. VERDICT Capitalism, materialism, love, lust, friendship, purity, the natural world, cleanliness, place, and self-image are all explored in this thunderous, lightning-speed, fast-reading tale. Zaher, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian, writes with passion and holds nothing back in her buzzy, strong debut.--Lisa Rohrbaugh
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A woman in search of herself. Palestinian journalist Zaher makes an absorbing fiction debut with a disquieting tale about race, class, morality, and artifice. Her narrator is a young Palestinian woman who finds herself in New York, teaching Black and immigrant middle school students. Hugely wealthy, although without access to an inheritance of more than $28 million because of the terms of her father's will, she lives on a monthly allowance doled out by her brother. As a friend remarks, she is "simultaneously rich and poor." Intent on looking "consistently chic and expensive," she wears designer clothing: Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, Miu Miu, Chloé, Fendi, and so much more. She is also simultaneously Black and white, a light-skinned Arab with a "deceiving complexion" that masks her true identity: an émigré with a troubled connection to her "biblical homeland" and to a current home she finds alienating. "I was scared of American culture," she admits. "When I say that, I don't mean the right to bear arms, I mean wedding dresses and obesity." Emotionally isolated and culturally estranged, she becomes obsessed with dirt. "I'm a moral woman," she says, "…all I want is to be clean." Zaher lavishes much attention on the narrator's constant scrubbing, bleaching, and abrading; she rubs herself raw. Her compulsion for cleanliness, she realizes, was instilled by the women she recalls growing up, who "placed a lot of importance on being clean, perhaps because there was little else they could control in their lives." Her own sense of control erodes after she becomes caught up in a pyramid scheme involving the resale of Birkin bags. "Fashion is pretense," she comes to realize, "education is pretense, personality, too, is a form of internalized pretense." In search of her "true essence," she withdraws into self-flagellating solitude that leads to the novel's shattering conclusion. A perilous journey, rendered in sensuous prose. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
