Susan Abulhawa. (2015). The Blue Between Sky and Water. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Susan Abulhawa. 2015. The Blue Between Sky and Water. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Susan Abulhawa, The Blue Between Sky and Water. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

Susan Abulhawa. The Blue Between Sky and Water. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

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Blue Between Sky and Water

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2015-10-19T11:52:00-04:00

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   • bioText: Susan Abulhawa is a human rights activist, a biologist, and political commentator. She is the founder ofPlaygrounds for Palestine, a children's organisation dedicated to upholding The Right to Play for Palestinian children. Her debut novel, Mornings in Jenin, was an international bestseller, translated into 26 languages. She lives in Pennsylvania with her daughter and their beloved dogs.
     
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2015-09-01T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Blue Between Sky and Water

fullDescription

In the small Palestinian farming village of Beit Daras, the women of the Baraka family inspire awe. Nazmiyeh is brazen and fiercely protective of her clairvoyant little sister, Mariam, with her mismatched eyes, and of their mother, Um Mahmoud, known for the fearsome djinni that sometimes possesses her. When the family is forced by the newly formed State of Israel to leave their ancestral home, only Nazmiyeh and her brother survive the long road to Gaza. Amidst the violence and fragility of the refugee camp, Nazmiyeh builds a family, navigates crises, and nurtures what remains of Beit Daras's community. But her brother continues his exile's journey to America, where, upon his death, his granddaughter Nur grows up alone, in a different kind of exile, the longing for family and roots eventually beckoning her to Gaza.
Internationally bestselling author Susan Abulhawa's powerful new novel explores the legacy of dispossession across continents and generations. With devastatingly clear-eyed vision of political and personal trauma, The Blue Between Sky and Water is the story of flawed yet profoundly courageous women, of separation and heartache, endurance and renewal.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: The story Susan Abulhawa tells in this marvelous novel is hard to bear but impossible to ignore. Her vision is precise, courageous, and dazzling.
2. • premium: False
   • source: The Independent
   • content: A family saga with global reach, these stories of fortune tellers, fighters, little girls and old women, jump off the page and into the soul and reach far beyond any headline or statistic, past the head, to the heart.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: Suffused with mystery, pain, and love . . . Abulhawa's characters' lives vividly depict resiliency in the face of adversity.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Library Journal (starred review)
   • content: Gripping and deeply moving . . . Suffering and resilience are difficult things to witness, but this powerful, politically engaged novel does so with a transformative literary grace. Abulhawa's prose is luminous; her control of a complex weaving of narrative voices – young and old, male and female, magical and real – is masterful . . . Hers is a voice that returns to the world the stories of Palestine that we ignore at our peril.
5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 6, 2015
     Abulhawa’s (Mornings in Jenin) tale of a Palestinian family is suffused with mystery, pain, and love. During the Israeli attack on the camps in Gaza on Dec. 27, 2008, young Khaled experiences something akin to Locked-in syndrome, something that he calls “a place of blue,” and from this state he is able to both witness the present and participate in the past. He is real enough to teach his great-aunt Mariam to read back in the family’s home village of Beit Daras long before he is born. In the present, Nur, an American-born psychotherapist of Palestinian descent, hears of Khaled and is spurred to travel to Palestine to attempt to help him, not knowing that she is herself a lost member of the family. Nur’s own life has been filled with loss and abuse. Her beloved grandfather died before he could bring her back to Gaza, and she was sexually assaulted by her stepfather before being rescued by a loving social worker, Nzinga. In Palestine, Nur finds “life and love and death and will were packed close.” Abulhawa’s characters’ lives vividly depict resiliency in the face of adversity.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 1, 2015
     Abulhawa (Mornings in Jenin, 2010) mixes magical realism, family melodrama, and politics in her storytelling about several generations of Palestinian women trying to survive in Gaza before and during the Israeli occupation. In 1948, soldiers from the newly established state of Israel attack the village of Beit Daras, raping and killing without remorse. Among those killed is Mariam, an unusually gifted child who has been taught to read and write by her friend Khaled. Mariam's sister, Nazmiyeh, assumes Khaled is imaginary until his picture appears in a photograph. Khaled is somehow reborn or transmitted into Nazmiyeh's grandson Khaled, born in 1998. By then, Nazmiyeh's brother, Mamdouh, has moved to America. His son, Mike, marries a Castilian-American, with whom he has a daughter, Nur. After Mike's death, Mamdouh wins custody of Nur but dies before he can return with her to Gaza. As a child, Nur experiences one travail after another, including an unloving "narcissist" for a mother, sexual abuse, and a string of foster homes. But she makes it through graduate school to become a therapist. Eventually, drawn by her Palestinian roots and her attraction to a Palestinian doctor, Nur ends up in Beit Daras, where she studies the case of a young boy who has fallen into a "coma-like" condition since an Israeli attack. The boy is Khaled, but Nur is at first unaware of their family ties. Nur's personal drama intertwines with not only her family's story, but with all of Gaza's struggle against the Israelis. In italicized sections, Abulhawa not only explains events in the narrative through Khaled's perceptions, but also gives what seems to be her own take on key moments in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. While a folk tale-like spirituality infuses the storytelling, readers' enjoyment will mostly depend on how they react to Abulhawa's violently anti-Israel and slightly milder anti-American perspectives.

     COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from September 15, 2015
     

     With the number of refugees worldwide at a record high, this novel is particularly relevant and insightful. Abulhawa (Mornings in Jenin) portrays four generations of women living in a Gaza refugee camp, all desperately trying to make the best of an intolerable situation. Nazmiyeh is the matriarch of this extended family, whose members live together under one roof, struggling to maintain their zest for life in what many would see as a hopeless struggle. The love they share proves to be much stronger than the bombings and vicious attacks they are forced to endure. The author, born to Palestinian refugees of the 1967 war, takes her title from a short poem that recurs throughout the story, summing up the philosophy of this refugee family. VERDICT Beautiful and heartfelt, this precise, vividly written novel is an inspiring choice for discussion groups.--Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH

     Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

59

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In the small Palestinian farming village of Beit Daras, the women of the Baraka family inspire awe. Nazmiyeh is brazen and fiercely protective of her clairvoyant little sister, Mariam, with her mismatched eyes, and of their mother, Um Mahmoud, known for the fearsome djinni that sometimes possesses her. When the family is forced by the newly formed State of Israel to leave their ancestral home, only Nazmiyeh and her brother survive the long road to Gaza. Amidst the violence and fragility of the refugee camp, Nazmiyeh builds a family, navigates crises, and nurtures what remains of Beit Daras's community. But her brother continues his exile's journey to America, where, upon his death, his granddaughter Nur grows up alone, in a different kind of exile, the longing for family and roots eventually beckoning her to Gaza.
Internationally bestselling author Susan Abulhawa's powerful new novel explores the legacy of dispossession across continents and generations. With devastatingly...

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Bloomsbury Publishing

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   • description: Fiction / Cultural Heritage