Reviews with content warning for Islamophobia - Home Is Not a Country

Really beautiful and moving story about family, identity, and belonging. I particularly appreciated how cultural artifacts of all sorts were used through the book to construct memories, identities, and community.

Elhillo richly describes food, clothing, music, and dance. The sensuousness of the language was a real strong suit. I haven't read many novels in verse, so I don't know how this compares with others in the genre, but the text seemed to favor the novelistic over the poetic. It was almost prose-like, though maybe I wasn't attuned to rhythmic aspects. Elhillo does slam poetry, and I tried to read with pauses inserted where there were breaks in the text, but I often found myself reading through the chapters as if they were sentences in a prose text and had no issue. I'd love to read some of her poetry to see if/how it differs.

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balletbookworm's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful informative sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

4.5 stars.

Another one I picked up off Jesse's Blackathon TBR rec video.

And it is a beautifully rendered novel-in-verse about a Sudanese-American girl who is kind of obsessed about the "her" who might have existed if her mother had named her Yasmeen (for the jasmine flower) instead of Nima (meaning "grace", and Nima doesn't think of herself as graceful). She eventually meets this Yasmeen in a surreal otherworld where she travels to a time when her parents were just married and the future was uncertain. Now, you do have to go with that little magical realism insertion, because I wasn't quite sure if I liked it at first, but the language is so lovely that it pulled me through. It doesn't quite hit 5 stars for me, because I'm not sure it nailed the ending all the way (insert: this is why I have trouble with time travel/timeloops/side-slips etc because they never seem to resolve satisfactorily for me), but that's pretty minor.

The language and structure of the poetry reminded me a lot of Chlorine Sky.

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kaynova's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

i wish i was able to express how beautiful this book was. i wish i could explain how this book has turned me upside down in the best way possible. i, wow, this book has left me speechless and i'm grateful to it.

Content Warnings