THE SKIN AND ITS GIRL

The coming-of-age of a blue-skinned girl.

Cypher’s debut has quite a few moving parts: On the one hand, her narrator, Betty, is trying to reckon with her Palestinian American family’s complicated history; on the other hand, Betty has blue skin. Another story thread has this queer narrator trying to decide whether or not to follow her partner around the world. Cypher doesn’t seem to know exactly what novel she wanted to write—as a result, this book feels like several different stories smashed awkwardly together. The most interesting parts follow Betty’s closeted queer aunt from Palestine to the U.S. as Betty tries to reckon with her own sexuality. But the fact of Betty’s blue skin (“the pure cobalt of a gas flame,” in Cypher’s words) distracts from all that. Ultimately, it’s unclear why Cypher bothered to veer into this magical realm. Betty’s blue skin and a few other unreal details are not only unbelievable from the standpoint of our world; they don’t really cohere even in Cypher’s own invented universe. Yet another thread, about Betty’s mother’s mental illness and her complicated relationship with Betty’s father, is never fully explored. Then, too, Cypher’s syntax frequently becomes tangled in a way that seems to strive toward lyricism though it ends up simply opaque. “It’s for the philosophers,” Cypher writes, “whether two people can live in the exact same place if that place is imaginary—or maybe a poet could tell me whether any set of words is sturdy enough, on its own, to duplicate an experience from one mind to the next.” Cypher can certainly be commended for her willingness to experiment in her fiction. Here’s hoping that, in her next work, she doesn’t forget the simple art of storytelling.

An overdetermined novel that can’t quite decide what notes it wants to strike.