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A homecoming queen and a bad-boy loner team up to break a generational curse in this YA supernatural horror from a talented American Egyptian voice.
Seventeen-year-old Mina is always focused on what comes next: exams, school dances, opportunities for a picnic by the lake. Filling up the future keeps her from lingering over how little she knows about her history or where she comes from. Anytime she asks her father questions about Egypt--or about her mother's mysterious death—he struggles to open up.
When Mina receives an invitation from an aunt she's never met to visit the Haikal mansion, her mother's childhood home in El Agamy, Mina accepts. She can't resist the chance to learn more about her roots or what happened to her mother, even if it means lying to her loves ones for the first time in her life.
But when Mina returns from El Agamy, she doesn't come back alone.
A sinister entity follows Mina from the Haikal mansion to her tiny California town. Mina is forced to abandon her friends, her father, and everything she loves in order to prevent the entity from violently possessing them. Isolated and fighting for her life, Mina must seek help from an unlikely ally: Jesse Talbot, the mortician's hostile son and the only person who proves immune to possession. Jesse would rather floss with barbed wire than team up with social butterfly Mina, but he doesn't exactly have a choice—after all, he's running from family secrets of his own.
As Mina and Jesse dig deeper into Mina's family lore, they uncover a bloody debt that must be satisfied if Mina wants to finish senior year alive.
"Hashem delivers an engaging, cohesive, genre-blending novel, executing the concept of a monster that weaponizes isolation with clarity and mounting suspense and seamlessly incorporating Egyptian Arabic and other culturally rooted details...Mina's struggle to belong, to understand her family's past, and to reconcile the parts of herself shaped by two worlds gives the novel a lingering emotional depth. A gripping, atmospheric blend of supernatural terror and the aching work of reclaiming agency." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Hashem mixes this chilling supernatural mystery with a satisfying, slow-burn romance that adds additional stakes to Mina's fight to survive, while developing Mina into an emotionally complex protagonist readers will genuinely fear for. The structure of the story moves through different time periods, settings, and viewpoints to slowly reveal the terrifying entity behind this generational curse. A well-earned but heartbreaking conclusion sets this tale apart from its peers." —Booklist (starred review)
"Mina's strong narrative voice is imbued with witty sarcasm and introspection, and Jesse is more than her match in clever banter. They've got a sparking chemistry that is sure to make romance fans swoon." —Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
This information about Where No Shadow Stays was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sara Hashem is an American-Egyptian writer from Southern California, where she spent many sunny days holed up indoors with a book. Her love for fantasy and magical realms emerged during the two years her family lived in Egypt. Her debut novel, The Jasad Heir, the first installment in her Egyptian-inspired adult fantasy duology The Scorched Throne, has received many accolades since its publication, including a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Where No Shadow Stays is Sara's YA debut.
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