Rating: really liked it
Now a Goodreads Choice finalist in Poetry! I am about the furthest thing from an expert on poetry. I have no idea what would be considered “good” and “bad” structure, rhythm, verse—any of it. So this is probably not going to be the best review to read if you’re looking for that kind of analysis.
Instead I can offer what a layman may think about this type of writing. I can recognize that something sounds nice but maybe not be able to articulate why. Also since this is a novel in verse as opposed to a collection of poetry, there’s a flowing narrative throughout that I think most people would be able to follow along with. So I’m going to be reviewing that story and how it’s related to the reader, not so much the prose itself. Hopefully some people still find that helpful.
The first part of the novel follows Nima, a teenage girl living in the United States with her mother, an immigrant from an unnamed Arabic-speaking country. (The author describes the country’s flag as red, green, white & black, and there are likely other markers which would clarify the specific country, but I wasn’t able to pick up on any of them. Safia Elhillo’s parents emigrated from Sudan, but it seems to be an intentional choice not to name their nation of origin, so I didn’t make that assumption with regards to Nima.)
Nima has a lot of the same insecurities of other teenagers, like loneliness and feeling like an outsider, but she’s also struggling in ways many of her peers can’t relate to. Both her and her childhood friend, Haitham, are living in a post-9/11 America. Nima is called a terrorist, mocked for her religion, bullied, shunned and harassed by her classmates and strangers alike. She finds herself daydreaming of an alter-ego version of herself, who Nima thinks of as Yasmeen, and disconnects from her life in the US by imagining what could have been if her mother hadn’t left her homeland.
Then around halfway through the story it changes into something else entirely. Nima enters a kind of dream-like state where she gets to watch her parents when they were young, before she was born, alongside her mirror self Yasmeen. This was a turn I wasn’t expecting this book to take, but I ended up really liking it. The differing perspective for the main character in imagining ‘what could have been’ was a great way to put her own actual life in perspective. Obviously I can’t get too much into the details without giving things away, but it was a welcome subversion of my expectations for this book.
I might have preferred a slightly different ending, but based on the rest of the story where Nima and her family and friends ended up made thematic sense. I wasn’t sure how I would take to a verse novel, but this one has inspired me to pick up more soon. Maybe Clap When You Land next? Not sure, but I’m also excited to read more from this author in the future!
*Thanks to Random House Children’s Make Me A World & Netgalley for an advance copy!**
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Rating: really liked it
REREAD (March 2022): 2.5 stars /// I'm not really sure why I decided to reread this book right now but I feel pretty similar about it to when I first read it a year ago. Elhillo is a gifted writer (and I can't wait for her new poetry collection that'll come out this July), however, she is not the strongest storyteller.
The plot of
Home Is Not A Country is veery straightforward, so much so that some characters feel more like props for Elhillo to get her message across, as opposed to real people. A lot of plot points and problems were solved in the most convenient way (especially the tension between Nima and Yasmeen), as soon as Elhillo got what she wanted out of the characters.
So, whilst I love the writing in this novel, I'm not the biggest fan of its plot and characterisation. On top of that, I feel like the message (= "show more gratitude for the life you've been given, it is full of possibilities") was way too on the nose. Elhillo often let her characters explain what certain events in the novel signify, e.g. when Nima travels through the portal back in time and meets her parallel self Yasmeen, Yasmeen explains to her: "i think we're supposed to watch, to learn something, maybe fill in some of the gaps we both have", and I was like NO SHIT SHERLOCK, thanks for the explanation.
I know this novel is intended for a YA audience, but it still feels like Elhillo dumbed it down to ensure that everyone would GET why certain things happened in the book and what her overall intention was. So, yeah, definitely not my favorite, but somehow still a book I would recommend to people interested in the subject matter. And I genuinely feel I would've enjoyed it more as a teenager, since Nima is a highly relatable teenage girl with all her insecurities and "mundane" problems. I think I would've seen myself in her, especially the beautiful, yet complicated relationship she shares with her mom.
On my reread, my favorite section of the novel was Nima's apology letter to her mother (p.77-78), which ends with the following harrowing lines: "i'm sorry you made this life / for me / instead of the bright & bountiful one / you could have tried to make for only yourself / i'm sorry i embarrass you / i'm sorry i don't have anything to show you / that it was all worth it" – GODDAMN.
REVIEW (March 2021):3 stars /// I discovered Safia Elhillo's work in 2018. Her debut poetry collection,
The January Children, had been recommended to me at the time, and I fell in love with her poetic voice. Her poems spoke of trauma, home, immigration, love, and friendship. I could connect with so much of what she was saying (and gosh, she was saying it so beautifully) that I knew that I would pick up whatever she would publish next.
I had to wait a long hard three years until the publication of her first novel,
Home Is Not A Country. Naturally, I preordered the book long before it was clear that it would be a YA novel written in verse. I usually tend to stay away from YA but in recent years Elizabeth Acevedo has won me over again and I can definitely see the appeal and charm of YA novels written in verse, especially when it's gifted poets like Elhillo and Acevedo doing the writing.
The Poet X has become one of my favorite books of all time, so, needless to say, my expectations for
Home Is Not A Country were very high.
Safia Elhillo's novel didn't quite meet all of my expectations but I'm not really mad about it.
Home Is Not A Country is still an incredibly beautifully crafted novel with a lot of potential. It echoed her debut poetry collection quite nicely, both in tone and in theme. However, whereas the latter was very self-contained,
Home Is Not A Country felt more unfinished and unpolished. Safia Elhillo had many great ideas and ambitions for the novel, but some of fell short due to pacing and other issues in the narrative structure. It felt like she only scratched the surface. Had she kept digging she would've unearthed something brilliant and raw.
Nonetheless, as a reader, you can still see the potential and fill in some of the gaps in the narration and marvel at the beautiful and rich world that Safia Elhillo did create. In the acknowledgements, she wrote:
Even during the times I didn’t know where I was from, I have always known those to whom I belong.
And that's exactly the spirit of the whole book.
Home Is Not A Country is not a love letter to Sudan nor to the US, even though the plot is split between these two places. It is a love letter to mothers and daughters and the bond they share. It is a love letter to friendship, to all the people who we can trust and count on no matter what. It is a love letter to the home we make ourselves.
The book tells the story of Nima who is a working-class, Muslim, immigrant kid raised by a single mother in suburban America. After the death of Nima's father, her pregnant mother had left Sudan in pursuit of a better life, only for Nima to find that the American dream might as well be a nightmare since she doesn't belong. Nima is bullied at school for her accented English, her poverty, her mother's hijab. Despite being born in the US, she isn't "American enough". She is an outsider. And even at home and at Arabic school, she doesn't really fit in. There, she feels not "Arabic enough".
Nima's frustration, her anger, her fears ... all of this was so vividly described by Elhillo that the reader couldn't help but totally feel for her. I wanted to give her a hug and tell her that everything would be okay. Whenever Nima argued with her mother (
why did you bring us here? / they hate us / why did you bring me here / to be tortured / to be alone / why would you / do that to me?), I found it so heartbreaking but could understand both sides. Safia Elhillo managed to create characters that felt incredibly real in their struggles. The way she captures the rising islamophobia in the US, especially after 9/11 is chilling. I cannot imagine what it must've been like for Muslims raising children in the US at that particular point in time.
i know something happened on the news again
because my mother has stopped wearing her scarf
to work
she who once said
i will never be ashamed of where come from
i will never let you be ashamed of who we are
seems to have changed her mind & i wonder
if this means i should feel ashamed too
Nima's mind often wanders back to her mother's (and her?) home country, she listens to old Arabic songs and gets lost in the old photographs of her parents. Sometimes, she wishes her mother had never left. She feels lost and clings to the idealised dream of Sudan that she has created in her head ever since she was little, seeing the longing on the adult's faces around here.
As a teenager, Nima turns inward and wants to disappear. Only her best friend Haitham who lives next door can get her out of her shell. And just as the two of them are best friends, so are their mothers. The two women migrated to the US together over a decade ago, and raised their children alongside each other. Therefore, the bond that Nima and Haitham share is extra special. But one day, shortly after 9/11, Haitham is beaten up in a hate crime, winding up in a hospital hooked up to machines. This sets off a chain of events that lets Nima discover her family's history in an usual manner – she is able to travel back in time and is given the opportunity to change the past.
This magical realism element came quite out of the blue (it is introduced a third way into the book) and so I had to adjust my expectations a bit, but ultimately, it was a great plot device that added a lot of richness (as Nima was able to explore Sudan and her mother's adolescence) and suspense to the story.
Home Is Not A Country has many twists and turns, many of which I didn't see coming. It was a captivating read, and I wasn't surprised that I read it within a couple hours. One thing I really loved about the book was how well fleshed out the friendship between Nima and Haitham was. Safia Elhillo made me care for both of them deeply, and that within a couple of pages.
are you going to tell? he whispers
& i shake my head thrumming
with excitement & fear a grin
stretches across his face good
he begins unwrapping the candy
because half of these are yours
Therefore, when Haitham winds up at the hospital, it was a great strategic narrative choice to put the time travelling interlude next, therefore, delaying the resolution of Haitham's fate. During the whole time travelling interlude, the reader is on the edge of their seat because we cannot bare for Haitham to die. By delaying certainty, we, as readers, are put in Nima's shoes as she explores her parents' past whilst also worrying about Haitham. This choice added a sense of urgency to the whole narrative, which I highly appreciated.
I know what Safia Elhillo was trying to achieve during the time travelling interlude, but I don't think it was as successful as it could've been. The whole episode felt very rushed. Nima is to quick to accept that she has just travelled in time, and her tensions with Yasmeen (the girl who guides her through the past) are resolved too quickly and not very convincingly. Had this part of the book been revised and refined,
Home Is Not A Country would probably be a 5-star read for me!
However, the origins of Yasmeen are still interesting. Some people have the gift of understanding that they could have been other people; Nima is one of them. She understands that her own life is just one branch of a tree, and the seeds that became her could have just as easily become someone else. Since she always wished to be invisible and to disappear, she projected all of her feelings on Yasmeen, the girl she should've been. Yasmeen is the name her father wanted to give her, therefore, she shapes it into a more graceful and confident version of herself. Yasmeen is everything she wants to be. But when Yasmeen takes real shape as Nima travels to the past, the two girls don't get along very well ... after all, they both know that only one of them will come back out of this trip alive.
The premise of having Nima and Yasmeen compete to change the past, so that they are the one who'll come out alive was fascinating and could've been so cool. But like I explained earlier, the execution was a bit of a mess and the whole episode felt extremely rushed. Nonetheless, I love the lessons that Nima took away from this trip.
but i was wrong he was never meant to be ours my father
he was always meant to be gone it was always bigger
than anything my small tampering could change
& my mother & i we were always meant to belong
to no one but each other
Nima felt so certain that one decision would solve all her problems, only to learn that nothing came out the way she expected and that not much has changed after all ((view spoiler)
[= her father still chose to leave her mother, and left Nima to swallow the bitter lie that she was fed during her childhood that he had died (hide spoiler)]). All of these what-ifs that only distract us without serving us any good. The book explores how questions about where we come from can take over our life, when the answer lies right there in the people who are closest to us, who are there for us, who make us us.
More than anything, I appreciate
Home Is Not A Country for the love letters to all the hard-working and loving mothers out there ("her name aisha means
she who lives / but mostly she goes to work & comes home tired") that it is. Despite its flaws, I would recommend it to people who are interested in novels written in verse and/or are familiar with Safia's work and enjoyed it thus far!
