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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Jun 2023, 336 pages
Paperback:
May 2023, 336 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Abby Edgecumbe
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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 ...
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)
(Reviewed by Abby Edgecumbe).
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. 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. 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. 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.
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 ...
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