WISHING UPON THE SAME STARS

Twelve-year-old Yasmeen Khoury doesn’t want to leave Detroit for San Antonio, Texas.

However, her father’s new job means the whole family is driving across the country to a new home in the suburbs, where all the houses look the same. The daughter of Christian parents—a Palestinian father and Lebanese mother—Yasmeen is no longer surrounded by an Arab community and faces bullying and racist name-calling at school. Meanwhile, Yasmeen’s Baba’s family is losing their home to Israeli expansion in Jerusalem. The Cohens, the Khourys’ new neighbors, are a Jewish Israeli family; Ayelet Cohen is in seventh grade with Yasmeen, and Mr. Cohen is coach of the after-school math club Yasmeen joins. This work, informed by the author’s own life and experiences, tackles many themes around identity, including the histories of Israel and Palestine, anti-Arab racism in the American South, and growing up in immigrant families that are deeply affected by events back home. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is presented as a dispute between two sides who have been equally wronged, and as Yasmeen and Ayelet find themselves trying to make sense of long-standing intergenerational pain symbolized as conflict between their fathers, the book delves into the history of the region, sometimes through intrusive infodumps. Mr. Cohen is portrayed as conciliatory and reasonable; by contrast, Yasmeen’s Baba is shown as explosively angry.

An ambitious novel about home and belonging that longs for more nuance.