Final day of our Fall Sale! Join BookBrowse today and discover exceptional books for only $3 / Month.

Summary and Reviews of Between Two Moons by Aisha Gawad

Between Two Moons by Aisha  Abdel Gawad

Between Two Moons

A Novel

by Aisha Abdel Gawad
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Readers' Rating:
  • First Published:
  • Jun 6, 2023, 336 pages
  • Paperback:
  • May 2023, 336 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About This Book

Book Summary

Set in the Arab immigrant enclave of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, following three siblings coming of age over the course of one Ramadan.

It's the holy month of Ramadan, and twin sisters Amira and Lina are about to graduate high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. On the precipice of adulthood, they plan to embark on a summer of teenage revelry, trying on new identities and testing the limits of what they can get away with while still under their parents' roof. But the twins' expectations of a summer of freedom collide with their older brother's return from prison, whose mysterious behavior threatens to undo the delicate family balance.

Meanwhile, outside the family's apartment, a storm is brewing in Bay Ridge. A raid on a local business sparks a protest that brings the Arab community together, and a senseless act of violence threatens to tear them apart. Everyone's motives are called into question as an alarming sense of disquiet pervades the neighborhood. With everything spiraling out of control, how will Amira and Lina know who they can trust?

A gorgeously written, intimate family story and a polyphonic portrait of life under the specter of Islamophobia, Between Two Moons challenges the reader to interrogate their own assumptions, asking questions of allegiance to faith, family, and community, and what it means to be a young Muslim in America.

A

We woke that morning, the first day of what would be a very hot Ramadan in June, to find the police raiding Abu Jamal's café. A dozen men, dressed more like construction workers than cops, loaded boxes of Nescafé instant coffee and Lipton tea into vans. They carried away glass shisha pipes the size of small children, and dumped mismatched cups and saucers into a large bin of shattered porcelain. Some led dogs on leashes—­big majestic German shepherds and one runty beagle, who sniffed furiously around all the tables.

I might have slept through it. I might have woken up a few hours later to find Abu Jamal's café closed, to be replaced a few months later with another Arab business—­a falafel stand or a travel agency specializing in trips to Mecca. But Baba woke me up.

"Wake up, ya binti," he said as he pushed our bedroom window open, the one that led out onto the apartment's fire escape. "Shoof! They arrest that stupid Libyan."

He climbed out ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Both sisters, in a way, are searching for the same thing: themselves. They want to escape Bay Ridge and the pressure "to ditch [the] cutoffs and halter tops for a nice, modest abaya." Yet they struggle with a sense of fidelity to their family and culture, not wanting to abandon them as they feel increasing scrutiny from "those people, out there in the world, who didn't know us and despised us." Gawad challenges readers to recall their own teenage years, to remember the fight for self-discovery and how directionless it feels to occupy that strange realm between adolescence and adulthood, and she explores what it means to be a Muslim youth in America today...continued

Full Review (618 words)

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today.

(Reviewed by Abby Edgecumbe).

Media Reviews

Booklist (starred review)
Gawad's engrossing, propulsive novel evokes the heat of summer, the sharp pangs that come with fasting, the oppressive climate of fear and distrust, and the insurmountable bond between sisters. An exceptional, not-to-be-missed debut.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A young Muslim woman comes of age in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, during a period of heightened anti-Arab prejudice in Gawad's astonishing debut...A knockout...This is a winner.

Kirkus Reviews
Gawad's excellent debut novel illuminates one family's story through the holy month of fasting against the backdrop of NYPD surveillance of a Muslim neighborhood and larger fears of detainment and deportation...Engaging...A complex portrayal of [a] whole community...A vibrant achievement.

Author Blurb Ernesto Quiñonez, author of Bodega Dreams
The Muslim community in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge is a world we hardly know, filled with Arab American women who have long been neglected in the white pages of American Letters. In Aisha Gawad's stylistically superb debut these women are seen, heard, and made known. Aisha's elegant and fearless prose introduces us to Amira and Lina, post 9/11 twin sisters who are scarred witnesses of the distrust, fear, and racism Arab Americans face every day. Yet, they soar. Amira, torn between leaving Brooklyn while staying loyal to her Egyptian heritage, to 'not to be like them—those people, out there in the world, who didn't know us and despised us.' And rebellious Lina, who like Icarus, just might have soared too high towards the violence of men. See Something, Say Something? In this doubtless classic, Aisha Gawad has seen many things, and her bold and dazzling prose illuminates everything.

Author Blurb Etaf Rum, author of New York Times bestseller A Woman Is No Man
Heartfelt. Moving. Powerful. Between Two Moons is a gorgeously written and profoundly intimate debut. Aisha Abdel Gawad follows an Egyptian family in New York as they struggle to navigate the immigrant experience, powerfully depicting the struggle to remain themselves and the pressure to assimilate, the emotional trauma, uncertainty, displacement, and culture shock. An urgent and unflinching story that deeply challenges and changes you. We need voices like those of Aisha Abdel Gawad.

Author Blurb Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America
Between Two Moons is a generous, beautiful portrait of both the joys and fears of Muslim life, one that doesn't treat lived experience only as tragedy. It is a moving look at family, survival, and celebration, one that will echo for decades.

Author Blurb Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise and American War
Between Two Moons is a fearless and unflinchingly honest debut. With dangerous accuracy, Aisha Abdel Gawad depicts a particular kind of immigrant existence, that of an Egyptian family in New York struggling with myriad fault lines, both generational and experiential. The small details throughout this story—from the mechanics of prayer-time ablution to the subtleties of Egyptian-accented English—are spot-on. More than anything, Between Two Moons is a story about the place so many Arabs in this part of the world have been forced to inhabit in the post-911 age: that malicious, disorienting chasm between the hope of being seen and the fear of being watched.

Reader Reviews

prem singh yadav

Between Two Moons -A Novel
Aisha Abdel Gawad's "Between Two Moons" is a charming and essentially arriving at family story that dives into the intricacies of character, sureness, and having a spot an inside the Muslim transient area of Waterway Edge, Brooklyn. Set during the ...   Read More

Write your own review!

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



Ramadan

Nighttime photograph of a crescent moon statue lit with neon light in Jordan for the celebration of Ramadan Aisha Abdel Gawad's debut novel, Between Two Moons, follows twin sisters Amira and Lina as they navigate self-discovery during the celebration of Ramadan. Ramadan is a month-long Islamic tradition characterized by spiritual devotion practiced through prayer, fasting, charity and other activities. It is considered one of the holiest times of year, and includes Laylat al-Qadr, known as the night that God revealed the Qur'an, the central text of Islam, to the prophet Muhammad. Ramadan is celebrated during the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, and in most places in the world falls at a different time each year due to an approximate 11-day difference between the Gregorian calendar, which adheres to solar months (currently used by the ...

This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Between Two Moons, try these:

  • If I Survive You jacket

    If I Survive You

    by Jonathan Escoffery

    Published 2023

    About this book

    A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller.

  • In the Time of Our History jacket

    In the Time of Our History

    by Susanne Pari

    Published 2023

    About this book

    Inspired by her own family's experiences following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Susanne Pari explores the entangled lives within an Iranian American family grappling with generational culture clashes, the roles imposed on women, and a tragic accident that forces them to reconcile their guilt or forfeit their already tenuous bonds.

We have 4 read-alikes for Between Two Moons, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Playground
    Playground
    by Richard Powers
    The primary narrator of Richard Powers' latest novel, Playground, is Todd Keane, who at 57 years old...
  • Book Jacket: The Empusium
    The Empusium
    by Olga Tokarczuk
    Not long after checking into Willi Opitz's "Guesthouse for Gentlemen," young Mieczysław Wojnicz...
  • Book Jacket
    Suggested in the Stars
    by Yoko Tawada
    In Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada's 2018 lightly dystopian novel, a ragtag group of young...
  • Book Jacket: Shred Sisters
    Shred Sisters
    by Betsy Lerner
    "No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister" is a wry aphorism that appears late in ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    In the Garden of Monsters
    by Crystal King

    A woman with no past, a man who knows her, and a monstrous garden that separates their worlds.

  • Book Jacket

    The Naming Song
    by Jedediah Berry

    Miyazaki meets Guillermo del Toro.

Book Club Giveaway!
Win Let Us Descend

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward imagines the life of an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War in this instant classic.

Enter

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

J O the B

and be entered to win..