the map of salt and stars by zeyn joukhadar

I think Mama lost her words too, because instead of talking, her tears watered everything in the apartment. My words sunk down like seeds, my vowels and the red space for stories crushed under my tongue. It went into the earth with Baba, deep in the white bone of the earth, and now it’s gone. And there was a hole in me too, and that’s where my voice went. When I said good night to him, the white bundle of him sagged so heavy, the hole they dug for him so deep.

The island of Manhattan’s got holes in it, and that’s where Baba sleeps.

The Map of Salt and Stars The Earth and the Fig 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. As Nour’s family decides to take the risk, their journey becomes more and more dangerous, until they face a choice that could mean the family will be separated forever.įollowing alternating timelines and a pair of unforgettable heroines coming of age in perilous times, The Map of Salt and Stars is the epic story of one girl telling herself the legend of another and learning that, if you listen to your own voice, some things can never be lost. When a stray shell destroys Nour’s house and almost takes her life, she and her family are forced to choose: stay and risk more violence or flee across seven countries of the Middle East and North Africa in search of safety-along the very route Rawiya and her mapmaker took eight hundred years before in their quest to chart the world. In order to keep her father’s spirit as she adjusts to her new home, Nour tells herself their favorite story-the tale of Rawiya, a twelfth-century girl who disguised herself as a boy in order to apprentice herself to a famous mapmaker.īut the Syria Nour’s parents knew is changing, and it isn’t long before the war reaches their quiet Homs neighborhood. In the summer of 2011, just after Nour loses her father to cancer, her mother moves Nour and her sisters from New York City back to Syria to be closer to their family. This rich, moving, and lyrical debut novel is to Syria what The Kite Runner was to Afghanistan the story of two girls living eight hundred years apart-a modern-day Syrian refugee seeking safety and a medieval adventurer apprenticed to a legendary mapmaker-places today’s headlines in the sweep of history, where the pain of exile and the triumph of courage echo again and again. “This imaginative but very real look into war-torn Syria is a must.” – Booklist (starred review)

The map of salt and stars by zeyn joukhadar