While we definitely should not judge books by their covers, I do think it's worth noting that the cover of this one is thought provoking.

Mother of Strangers by Suad Amiry blends fact with fiction to give a narrative that will captivate readers and take them deeply into the Palestinian experience.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this book with me. All thoughts are my own.

This book has much to commend it in that it’s an accessible account of the Naqba and highlights the plight of the Palestinians so brutally displaced by the Jewish occupation. But as a novel it has many shortcomings. Set in Jaffa between 1947 and 1951, it focusses on a few main characters caught up in the ruthless, cruel and violent dispossession of the native inhabitants, the repercussions of which event continue of course to this day. The book does a good job of depicting those days and successfully humanises what happened to the people who paid such a price for the establishment of Israel. But from a literary and stylistic point of view, it’s not great literature. The style is simplistic, all telling and no showing, little sense of interiority and little character development, clunky dialogue and no clear narrative voice. The historical and political explanations are clumsily inserted. I found it hard to engage with the characters in spite of their obvious suffering. However in its defence I do think it’s a worthwhile read just not a very satisfactory one.

Thank you Knopf Publishing and Netgalley for letting me read and review this book. Mother of Strangers is a historical fiction romance. I've never read that genre before, but want to more in the future. This book is so well written and has intriguing characters. Amiry has beautiful world building and character development. "Set in Jaffa in 1947-51, this fable-like novel is a heartbreaking tale of young love during the beginning of the destruction of Palestine and displacement of its people." It was a little slow in the beginning of the book, but after that I was hooked and couldn't put the book down. I learned a lot in this read as well.

MOTHER OF STRANGERS

Vaguely reminiscent of Kanafani’s The Land of Sad Oranges, Mother of Strangers (MoS) follows Subhi & Shams, two kids living in Jaffa on the eve of the Nakba. Like in Kanafani’s short story, telling this history through the eyes of its younger victims adds both vulnerability & clarity to its details; ‘gone’ are the ‘politics’ (can you tell I’m rolling my eyes) that stop so many conversations about Palestine—only the raw ‘stuff’ remains.

Subhi & his family don’t live in some fairytale vacuum devoid of roots; they, along with 100,000 others, were well-established in Jaffa & the surrounding villages before 1947 & Amiry begs you to ask the question: WHAT HAPPENED to them? MoS can be quiet in its establishment of place & memory, bringing you through Subhi’s everyday life as a mechanic, buying a suit he hopes will be used for his wedding day, making kites for other children at an annual festival. To so many readers far detached from war, this is a reminder that people living in war zones have *actual lives* & that, beyond the pressing fear of violence, there are more mundane things about which to worry: where you will buy food, how you will work & be paid. In this context of occupation, specifically, Amiry’s establishment of place & memory is a more overt reminder of sheer existence. Subhi’s story insists: we were HERE. We lived here, in our homes, with our families, these were our lives. Despite repeated & concerted Zionist attempts at revising history to say otherwise, that reminder slams into your chest with every page, again & again: we were here, we were here, we were here.

This book made me profoundly sad, because it forced me to reckon with all that has been lost & all that continues to be buried. This reckoning isn’t new & it’s far from enough (the situation demands, for instance, action & not just sadness), but it is sorrowful nonetheless. Similarly to Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World, Amiry’s tale is also *barely* fiction—its pages contain shatteringly real heartbreak & weaves a truly impressive level of information on the Nakba into its pages. Quite like ATLW, too, MoS is a narrative that Israel will never be able to erase.

Rating this book feels wrong. Because five stars doesn’t seem enough. It doesn’t seem adequate for how it made me feel. But for the sake of a rating, it’s one of the easiest five stars I’ve given.

I’ve read a lot of books that changed the way I saw things but I rarely come across one that confronts me with painful truths. Those books give colour to things I knew but couldn’t see, attaching a story to facts and they stay in my mind much longer than other books. Mother of Strangers was one of them.

Subhi, the fifteen-year-old mechanic and mc of this book, had a sharp sense of humour but despite that, no part of this book has been easy to read. It was set in a time a little before the British mandate ended, the Palestine before. And knowing what I know now, I spent every minute taking in all the details of the flourishing city of Jaffa, their traditions, their festivities, knowing that it no longer exists—buried as a memory under the long, ongoing occupation and genocide.

I started highlighting the passages a little into the book and I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. I’ve waited a long time. To see Palestine from the eyes of a Palestinian, to see a Palestinian shoot down one of the most common zîonist sayings, which is that Palestine didn’t exist. In this book, you see the actual history, where Palestine was once a beautiful(it still is, despite it all) country booming with trade. When Palestine was free.

Reading a book was like watching a movie. And in this movie, I saw a Palestine I haven’t seen(I’ve heard of but reading it makes it more vividly real) and it’s sad, knowing what it was and what it is now.

It was heartbreaking to read about how Subhi went from living an ordinary life as a clever, yet naive mechanic hopelessly in love with 13 year-old-Shams, who he one day hopes to marry, to someone whose life gets turned upside down as he and the rest of the Palestinians lose their homes, their country, their peace, their lives. It was especially difficult to read the pages where families were ripped apart. The knowledge that many of them never saw their families again haunted me, while also making me realise how much I have to be grateful for.

I’m not a crier. This book was not only one of the few that made me cry, but with the others, I only cried once. Either when a character dies or at the end, when all the emotions I felt in the book hit me at once and overwhelmed me. But, I lost count of the number of times I cried while reading Mother of Strangers. I cried in the middle, when their lives were being snatched. In all the happy, peaceful parts, knowing that it’ll never be the same. Knowing it’s ephemeral. I cried when I was talking to my friend about this book and again when I was writing this review.

I know the end was supposed to be one of the saddest parts of the book but all I felt was numb, after seeing one tragedy after another, without the space to breathe or grieve properly. Crushed hopes and ruined dreams. But somewhere there, subtle but impactful, there was hope. Hope that one day, they’ll return. That one day, Palestine will be free again.

Profound, painful and informative, Mother of Strangers ripped my heart into pieces, while also stitching it back together. I will be recommending this book for a long time

I suspect that most of us only know of Palestine from what we read in the news. But just like in any other region of the world, there are stories... real stories. Amiry has captured an unusual story here quite evocatively. We are able to picture each detail of Jaffa and the people who call it home. It's a sad story but one that is presented with little judgement from the author. It's what happened and the tragedy continues. Coming of age stories are something we somehow all can feel personally.

As a Jewish reader, I found this tale of life during and after partition to be something we should all know more about. I try to read multiple points of views for situations that perplex and bother me. This is a story that could be widely read.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. I really did treasure it as I read it.

Amiry's choice for the title of her novel, Mother of Strangers, is an homage to the city of Jaffa, the city in which most of the story is set. Indeed, while this is a coming-of-age tale revolving around two young muslims, a 13 year old girl named Shams and a 15 year old boy named Subhi, Mother of Strangers is more accurately a memoir of a lost place and people: Jaffa in the 1940s, before the end of the British Mandate and the beginning of the Arab-Israeli war. This novel is a literary memorial to the Palestine and the ethnically-, religiously-mixed community that lived there. (It should be noted that Amiry based the story on real events. There was a real Shams and a real Subhi.)

Through Subhi's and Sham's young eyes, the reader is treated to a view of Palestine before it became haunted by politics of religion, zionism, and war, what it it is today. Both of them were on the edge of a modern moment; in some ways eager to tear away from the traditionalism of life as it was lived by their forebears and in other ways, seeking approval and belonging in that world -- only to find themselves wrenched away from it violently by invasion and war. This is a serious, heart breaking novel, not to be undertaken lightly. Grief and loss thread through it from its start, beginning with children wanting to assert to their own identities and desires, the shedding of childhood and ending with the actual, fatal loss of children, mothers, family, belongings, and legacies. This is a serious, important novel because it highlights this often-hidden aspect of Palestinian trauma. This novel humanizes a history and experience that is often sterilized in the news.

I couldn't possibly give this novel any more stars. It is well worth the read and the tears.

Set in Jaffa--yes, where the oranges come from--in the late 1940's, "Mother of Strangers" focuses on working-class Palestinians during the civil war and partition. Subhi is only fifteen but already known as a one of those mechanics who can immediately see how to repair any machine. He's in love with a thirteen-year-old country girl he met at a festival, and he is eager to earn enough to marry her and launch his own family. Suad Amiry lovingly sets the scene of cafes, cinemas, markets, and large families happily into one another's business. But then the civil war begins, with some of the first of many displacements of Palestinians and families scrambling to find one another.

Amiry so carefully creates the setting--a place and time new to many westerners--that you can almost smell the coffee in the cafe and the oranges in the fields. Watching these rooted families become refugees, fighting to survive mayhem and stick together is moving and hard. Amiry sheds light on little known events in a difficult time.