Excerpt from Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"And I thought Lent was bad," Reina said.

"Lent is for pussies," Lina said. "Muslims are hard."

"Yeah, so hard they be blowing up shit." Reina made an explosion with her fist.

"At least we don't go around with cocaine up our assholes—­right, Roo?"

Lina looked at me for backup. This was a game we usually loved to play with Reina—­sometimes it was a competition over whose people were the most fucked up or sometimes the least fucked up—­but, today, I wasn't paying any attention.

I was thinking about our brother again. Usually, I was pretty good at limiting my thoughts of him to once a month. Once my brain hit that quota, it shut down that lobe for another month, and Sami was again banished. But he was up for another parole hearing, and I kept seeing his face on other people's bodies as they walked around Bay Ridge. While Reina and Lina argued, I was looking across the street at a mural of schoolchildren holding hands in a circle and imagining his face painted onto all their sweet multicultural cartoon heads. A dozen cartoon Samis holding hands. And earlier that morning, during suhoor, I saw him holding a baseball mitt on the back of a Cheerios box. Sami didn't even like baseball. Or at least he never used to. I didn't know what he liked or didn't like anymore.

Excerpted from Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad. Copyright © 2023 by Aisha Abdel Gawad. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.