A review by mmotleyu
Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye

2.0

Well, I picked this book up believing it to be the Habibi that is on the 2015 most challenged books list... gotta remember to check the author, but there could only be 1 book titled Habibi, right? I had a hard time reading this because nothing ever really happened. It is a nice intro for higher elementary students to the Arab/Israeli conflict as an Arab American girl moves to Jerusalem when she is 14 and tries to figure out her place in her culture and in this area of the world that has known little peace. There are brief glimpses of violence like when her grandmother's bathroom is destroyed by Jewish soldiers for no reason and later her father is jailed for helping a refugee boy who has been shot in the leg. The violence is on the periphery; this is really a story of hope for peace shown through the naive eyes of a young Arab girl who likes a young Israeli boy. Not the read that I had hoped for, but one I would give my 10 year old daughter for an intro to issues... not sure how confused a younger reader might be with the geography of all the gates in Jerusalem and the West Bank and other geographic/cultural/religious terms/places.