Sonora

This debut novel by Assadi, a recent MFA grad, is a hypnotic coming-of-age story set in the Southwestern Sonoran Desert and New York City. Like Assadi herself, Ahlam is the daughter of a Palestinian refugee father and an Israeli mother, and her intimate narration carries the reader effortlessly between the past and the present, through a kaleidoscope of memories, as she sits at her father's side in the hospital. The myths he taught her merge with those from many other cultures throughout the novel. In high school, Ahlam felt like an outcast and "other" until she met Laura, another misfit whose heritage is Native American and Mexican. Laura and Ahlam become almost one person, navigating their first experiences with sex and drugs together. They meet the artistic young Dylan in their high school library and follow him to New York, where their bacchanalian lifestyle recalls an older, messier city where it was possible to live on next to nothing and party all night.