This was an interesting and thought-provoking read. I really enjoyed the writing, and the cover artwork is really stunning!

Thanks so much to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and provide an honest review! I loved the synopsis and was excited to jump into reading. The beginning was intriguing, but it quickly became overwhelming to follow. The 2nd person POV with constant randomly changing timeline was so hard to follow. The chapters are also long, so I found I needed lots of time to get through them. I kept rereading pages trying to keep up. Unfortunately I decided to DNF this one. It’s beautifully written and if you like 2nd person POV and have the time to finish long chapters in a sitting this might be the book for you!

This is a shocking debut; the writing is so mature and completely enthralling. This multi-generational saga is beautiful.

This forthcoming novel was absolutely fascinating. It has a little Rushdie in its preoccupation with narrative structure across continents and generations, but mostly, is like nothing I’ve read before.

The novel is narrated by Betty Rummani, born with skin as blue as her Palestinian family’s famed soap (The soap factory has been destroyed, and some family members think she might be the soul of the soap). The story is told in second-person address to her aunt, Nuha Rummani, who arrives at the hospital when Betty is born and convinces her mother not to give her up for adoption. Nuha is a major force in Betty’s life, advocating for her, protecting her, and eventually serving as a queer role model.

The plot is both epic, with the unraveling of intergenerational dramas that intersect with the changing status of Palestine, and understated, with Betty’s parents’ complicated relationship and her mother’s mental health challenges. When I think back on it, this book was much more about the how than the what. The way the plot is communicated, with layers of narration and lots of metacommentary on the nature of storytelling—both traditional forms from the Arab world and the half-truths that make up families. This tricky structure won’t be for everyone, but I found it to be endlessly interesting.

I do wish a bit that I’d picked this up at a different time. I’ve been reading it bit by bit as I travel, and it is confusing, so I feel like I lost a lot of the narrative threads. But it was also too compelling for me to want to put it off for later! I look forward to revisiting this unique debut.

An important and innovative debut from a novelist whose career I will be excited to follow into subsequent books.

This book wasn’t bad, however I found it way longer than it needed to be.

Maybe that’s the style the author was going for but it was very repetitive.

The plot itself was really intriguing. The sacrifices that the older generations had to make for the newer ones to explore their sexuality freely and be loved differently was so beautifully done.

All the characters really had their own issues to work through, but through it all their family and their culture kept them together even if it was strained.

3/5 starts. I’d still recommend 💙

What a story. A girl born with blue skin, who was almost given away by her mother but is saved by the girl's great aunt. In many ways, that was so relatable to me. The novel is filled with gorgeous prose about family, relationships, shared stories, sexual identity, and lineage. I'm a fan of books about family sagas and how characters confront questions about their identity in relation to their family legacy. As a child of immigrant parents and battling with questions about my own identity within the bigger picture of our family saga, I can utterly relate to the main character. <I>The Skin and Its Girl<i> is a stunning debut novel.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House/Ballantine Books for the ARC.

The main character was at a crossroads in her life so she went to visit her aunt’s grave and talk with her to gain insight on a decision she must make. After reading her aunt’s notebooks and reliving the tales she heard growing up she does find clarity. I had high hopes for this book. Unfortunately, it fell flat for me; I almost DNF. The writing style of this book made it difficult to keep me engaged. At times, I couldn’t tell if the timeline was in the present or the past. Additionally, there were a few words that I felt were overused; seeing them so often started to get a bit irritating. I did like the cover though, I thought it was pretty.

I enjoyed learning and reading about the Palestinian experience, LGBTQ, and multiple generations. For me, It starts out very intriguing, but I lost the thread of the story and was confused by the narrative.
Thank you Net Galley.

Felt like a memoir, I searched multiple times convinced it was real, which makes it so powerful! I didn’t feel the cover matched the emotion within this story, didn’t do it justice. Really enjoyed!

I was excited to read this book and I wanted to like it so much. But unfortunately, the book just never grabbed my attention and it felt like a slog to get through. I think I was expecting the plot to be slightly different and the writing was slower and more methodical than I anticipated. I’m sure this is a lovely book for a different reader.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc.

The Skin and Its Girl is a fantastical story of a baby born with blue skin. Her mother had been set to give up the baby for adoption before her great aunt intervened. Twenty years later, the young woman is now facing a personal choice about whether to move with her lover to another country.
The story is told in the second person narrative, addressed to her great aunt Nuha, now deceased. The writing is poetic, sometimes a bit too much. “There is no truth but in old women’s tales.” The book flows between the present, Betty’s youth and the family’s history. It deals with trying to live our own life while having family obligations, of finding one’s own identity.
It’s a slow story, a dense one. I found myself alternating between highlighting beautifully written lines while skimming others.
In the end, I was engaged by Nuha’s story, but not by Betty’s, who despite her unique appearance, at times felt more like a vessel than a being.
My thanks to Netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book.

This book really drew me in with the plot description, and I was intrigued at first but I did not end up finishing. I think that it became confusing for me to understand what was going on, whether it was a combination of the prose or just the way different points in time were being referenced, I just found myself not fully comprehending what was going on. I wouldn't NOT recommend this book to someone, I think the story had a lot of potential, but I just don't think it was for me.

I wanted to love this book. The premise of the story is intriguing, the writing is poetic and lush, the addition of some fable-like stories from the past adds depth, but the story meanders and it is hard to follow the second-person narration. Halfway through the story I still feel as though I know very little about the blue child born so spectacularly in the opening chapter of the book - why is she blue, or better yet, what was her life like, since we skip from her birth to twenty years later, and there is so much else going on that we have lost any real connection to the main character. I’ll give it two stars, with the admission that I did not finish.

This is a well-written forage into cultures, shared histories and family relationships. Elsbeth (Betty), the main character, is born blue at birth because of an umbilical cord problem. Although her mother at first wants to give Betty up for adoption, she changes her mind and takes her home to be raised herself and Betty’s grandmother and aunt. The plot revolves around family stories, and as Betty matures, she has to figure out for herself which stories are true and which she will let shape her as a person.

I enjoyed this read, but I was definitely troubled by the second person POV, which I found off-putting. And, as beautiful as some of the passages are, the novel meanders quite a bit through various periods of time so much so that at times I was unsure what timeframe was actually being discussed.

All in all this was a good debut novel.

I really wanted to enjoy this book. The premise is so compelling and seemed like my kind of read. But I found the writing almost impenetrable. With constant perspective and time shifts, I felt perpetually confused and had to keep rereading passages to understand who or what the narrator was talking about. I haven’t worked this hard to power through a book in a long time and I ultimately never engaged with the characters or the story.

The book is okay. It does tell a story about a queer woman, who is finding some details in her family’s life through a series of her aunt’s notebooks. Also, it tells about when she was born her skin was blue. She spent her life with that skin color and dealt with family secrets.

Thanks to the publishers of the Random House Publishing Group, and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for a review.

I really liked this book. I appreciated the exploration of identity and relation to family heritage. I liked the flashbacks to the past. The writing was meandering in a good way, beautiful.

If you are looking for a plot-driven novel that is an easy read, you can just pass this book by. If you love lush language, deep psychological exploration, a circuitous and slow reveal, and haunting characters, then, yes, this is your book. Employing folk tales and metaphor, and rich with history, this is a remarkable debut novel addressing questions of identity, heritage, love, and loyalty.

The Rummani family’s stories were kept by Auntie Nuha. She rescues a newborn from being given up for adoption. The infant’s mother was depressive and separated from a husband who had betrayed her. While the child was being born, the family’s abandoned soap factory oversea in Palestine was being destroyed. The legendary soap had made the family fortune. Auntie told of a blue soap that turned girls blue, giving a heritage to the new baby whose skin was indigo.

Now grown, the girl has come to her aunt’s graveside. Both women were constrained by their skin; Auntie taking on another’s identity, and the girl by the blue that set her apart. She is struggling to decide between staying with her mother or leaving with her lover. A decision that Auntie had made upon her birth, when she had planned to leave with her lover but stayed behind to care for her.

“There is no truth but in old women’s tales,” the girl is told. Auntie was full of stories. Her stories interpret life and the world: the Tower of Babel, the pursuit of an elusive silver gazelle, a boy on fire saved by a girl’s rope of long hair.

An admirable debut novel.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

I'm struggling with the writing on this one so this will be a DNF for now and I will not be reviewing it currently. I may return to it later and see if it works better for me in the future.