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jiyoung 's review for:
The Map of Salt and Stars
by Zeyn Joukhadar
Fiction comes to life in this story of Nour, a Syrian preteen who flees civil war and journeys across North Africa. Nour’s plight parallels a story her late father would tell, one of a young mapmaking apprentice whose adventures inspire Nour to persist. The themes and cadence of the story made for an entertaining read, but Joukhadar falls short in his attempts to inject profundity or surprises into the plot (why couldn’t the mother just *say* “go to Ceuta”? Why have an unnecessarily cryptic map?)