Literary gold! This was by far the most beautiful book I’ve read this year and really and truly, this hurt so good. The story follows a Syrian couple separated by the travel ban enacted in January 2017 under Trump’s presidency and the chaos that follows. Let me start by saying, I was not following the news at this time in an effort to protect my own mental health and suppressed a lot of what was happening at the world, so reading this really opened up my eyes to a lot of the experiences that I hadn’t fully understood. It was a painful, yet incredibly necessary read for me.

Some things I loved about this book are the reflection of the American dream and what that looks like for different people. Additionally, I appreciated the commentary that just because you were born in a space, doesn’t mean you need to die there too. We follow two characters with vastly different ideologies of what freedom looked like and how the path they got to America impacted their long-term experience with the country. It was a deeply tragic story that the author managed to put on paper and I’ll be thinking about it for a while.