![]() ![]() I couldn’t quite give this 5 stars because I wasn’t sure how realistic the ending was. I don’t pretend to understand what it’s all about or to know what we should do about, but I know that we can’t ignore it. ![]() They put more than a face on the images that we see on tv of the plight of Syrian refugees. The author provides a view a people, their culture by providing an intimate look at this fictional family. There are vivid descriptions of places, things, feelings accentuated by a form of synesthesia that causes Nour to experience these thing by colors. I was, however, taken with the connections between the stories - the maps, the places, that home is not necessarily defined by a place but by where your family is. Maybe because of the fantasy elements of the latter story. I was much more interested in knowing what would happen to Nour and her family than in Rawiya’s adventures. As with many books with dual story lines, I usually am drawn to one more than the other. The second narrative is a story within the story and it represents the beautiful bond that Nour had with her father who told her stories ever night. This is yet another story with dual times alternating Nour’s present day journey with another young girl, Rawiya, 800 years earlier. We follow 12 year old Nour and her mother and sisters from New York to Syria to Jordan to Libya to Morocco. This proved to be the worst possible time with a civil war looming and it tells of their harrowing and heartbreaking struggle to find safety. This book was somewhat different with a family moving back to Syria in 2011 after the father dies. There have been quite a few novels written over the last several years about the refugee experience, mostly how they are trying to manage their new lives in the US. As Nour’s family decides to take the risk, their journey becomes more and more dangerous, until they face a choice that could mean the family will be separated forever.įollowing alternating timelines and a pair of unforgettable heroines coming of age in perilous times, The Map of Salt and Stars is the “magical and heart-wrenching” ( Christian Science Monitor) story of one girl telling herself the legend of another and learning that, if you listen to your own voice, some things can never be lost. When a shell destroys Nour’s house and almost takes her life, she and her family are forced to choose: stay and risk more violence or flee across seven countries of the Middle East and North Africa in search of safety-along the very route Rawiya and her mapmaker took eight hundred years before in their quest to chart the world. In order to keep her father’s spirit alive as she adjusts to her new home, Nour tells herself their favorite story-the tale of Rawiya, a twelfth-century girl who disguised herself as a boy in order to apprentice herself to a famous mapmaker.īut the Syria Nour’s parents knew is changing, and it isn’t long before the war reaches their quiet Homs neighborhood. Nour has just lost her father to cancer, and her mother moves Nour and her sisters from New York City back to Syria to be closer to their family. ![]()
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