Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye
Summary: Meet “darling” Liyana in this poetic, although a bit naïve, novel. Written as a diary, through its pages you can walk the narrow streets and alleys of Jerusalem’s Old City quarters and listen to a Babel of sounds while smelling the spicy food flavours from a myriad different cultures and cuisines. But in this “cake made of layers of time” not all is as peaceful as Liyana’s family thought when they first moved from America. In Israel/Palestine (or “Is-Pal” or “Pal-Is” as Liyana and her brother innocently call it to try to solve the dichotomy) “old anger floated around”; soon all of them would have to face different grades of violence and learn how to deal with it. LRB About the author: Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent, and Nye spent her adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. Nye’s experience of both cultural difference and different cultures has influenced...