”There is a darkness in me, now. A monster awakened from a very long sleep. I suppose it was always there, but now it's running loose. I get angry at things, insignificant things. I snap at Tidir for being kind to me. I scold my children for being children. I choose my words carefully like I would a weapon. I hurt the people I love. I watch it all happen like I would a movie. I do not trust the man in the mirror anymore.”

This little book definitely hit me harder because my parents are immigrants from Iran just like Idir and Tidir, and my brother and I could easily step into the shoes of Ramzi and Salma. News outlets paint immigrants as almost a blight on their recipient societies, when, ironically, it is often the host countries themselves that foster and inflict the barbarism they so readily expect from immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers onto their own inhabitants. Obtaining citizenship is not easy, and the process is infected with much hypocrisy. Fleeing pain in one’s native land only to confront another version of it; people driven to pick their poison, choking it down, knowing the damage it’ll do, bearing the brunt of it to shield their children who, if everything goes right, will never know its taste from neither here nor there.

All that aside, I loved the writing style; the terrorist was pretty funny. I do wish the ending was a bit longer, but the pacing was otherwise fantastic.