#sara novic

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read True Biz by Sara Nović (2022)?

yes

no

I didn't finish it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onJan 12, 2025

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Fiction Free-for-All Book Bracket Tournament: Round 1D

Choose a book:

True Biz by Sara Nović

The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar

Voting ended onMar 8, 2025

Book summaries below:

True Biz by Sara Nović

TRUE BIZ (adj./exclamation; American Sign Language): really, seriously, definitely, real-talk True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history finals, and have politicians, doctors, and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges readers into the halls of a residential school for the deaf, where they'll meet Charlie, a rebellious transfer student who's never met another deaf person before; Austin, the school's golden boy, whose world is rocked when his baby sister is born hearing; and February, the headmistress, who is fighting to keep her school open and her marriage intact, but might not be able to do both. As a series of crises both personal and political threaten to unravel each of them, Charlie, Austin, and February find their lives inextricable from one another's—and changed forever. This is a story of sign language and lip-reading, disability and civil rights, isolation and injustice, first love and loss, and, above all, great persistence, daring, and joy. Absorbing and assured, idiosyncratic and relatable, this is an unforgettable journey into the Deaf community and a universal celebration of human connection.

Contemporary, literary fiction, coming of age, adult

The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar

Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother’s ghost has begun to visit him each evening. As his grandmother’s sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria.

One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s—and his grandmother’s—in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z’s story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isn’t and has never been alone, he has the courage to officially claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare.

As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along.

Featuring Zeyn Joukhadar’s signature storytelling, The Thirty Names of Night is a timely exploration of how we all search for and ultimately embrace who we are.

Literary fiction, magical realism, contemporary, historical fiction, 1930s, lyrical, adult

[lovrboyx]

Still, as Wanda rehashed the centuries' long march toward her people's extinction, she hoped February might see what she was really saying:

This is not your fault; this is the way it always has been; there is nothing any of us can do; I love you so much for trying.

True Biz by Sara Novic

[nerdgirlnarrates]

I started a new novel last week and tore through it in five days. It’s been a while since I’ve had the “can’t put it down” feeling about a book, and it’s great to have it back. Anyway, the book was True Biz by Sara Novic, and I highly recommend it.

[sassyalone]

Me, said Austin, pointing to himself.  He patted his chest, then his arms, then held out his hands, flexed his fingers before her.  You, he said. He took her by the wrists and held her own hands out before her. She looked down at her palms and understood - her being was implied, her potential thoughts and feelings coursing through her body, the names of everything she knew and those she didn't yet, all in perpetual existence in her fingertips.

True Biz, Sara Novic 

[authorstalker]

My May & June Reads

If We Were Villains, M.L. Rio - Fun but a bit too long! A young adult/coming-of-age version of The Secret History.

True Biz, Sara Nović - I really enjoyed this YA-adjacent novel, which is told from the perspective of multiple characters at a school for the deaf. The chapters are broken up with mini how-to and history lessons on American Sign Language, so you get to learn while reading a truly gripping story.

Teenager, Bud Smith - This reads like Hemingway and Bukowski decided to co-write a teenage love (?) story. Insane and fun! Great writing. It was a nice break from my usual books.

These Precious Days, Ann Patchett - It's an Ann Patchett essay collection—obviously it gets five stars. Gosh I just love her writing. My favorites: every essay about her dad, the essay about her mom, the essay about her extremely beautiful nature friend, the essay about why Snoopy is her writing mentor, the essay about her not-so-great experience in her MFA program. I read the titular essay and the one about her three dads when they were originally published online; I decided not to reread them but they 're amazing. My most favorite essay was the one about her decision to not have kids. Wowowow.

Things to Look Forward To, Sophie Blackall - I am such a fan of Sophie Blackall's illustrations, I have two of them framed in my bathroom (I recommend hanging art in your bathroom!). This is a nice book to flip through at the end of a long day—it is indeed a list of "things to look forward to" with personal stories woven throughout.

A Place for Us, Fatima Farheen Mirza - Absolutely devastating. I loved it, I cried. Don't read about it in advance, just go read the actual book.

[greygilberti]

Tru Biz by Sara Nović is a book about people who are deaf and how difficult their lives are with different issues, some of which don't inherently revolve around their inability to hear. One of the main protagonists is also a gay woman who is married. No one questions it. It is never brought up. It's just a fact of life. Just like her wife's job is a lawyer. It's accepted. And I love that! Being gay is normalized in this book and it's great. We need more content like this.

[yaworldchallenge]

🇭🇷  Croatia

Region: Eastern Europe

Girl at War

Author: Sara Nović

320 pages, published 2015

Original language: English

Native author? Yes

Age: Teen-Adult

Blurb:

Zagreb, 1991. Ana Juric is a carefree ten-year-old, living with her family in a small apartment in Croatia's capital. But that year, civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, splintering Ana's idyllic childhood. Daily life is altered by food rations and air raid drills, and soccer matches are replaced by sniper fire. Neighbors grow suspicious of one another, and Ana's sense of safety starts to fray. When the war arrives at her doorstep, Ana must find her way in a dangerous world.

 New York, 2001. Ana is now a college student in Manhattan. Though she's tried to move on from her past, she can't escape her memories of war--secrets she keeps even from those closest to her. Haunted by the events that forever changed her family, Ana returns to Croatia after a decade away, hoping to make peace with the place she once called home. As she faces her ghosts, she must come to terms with her country's difficult history and the events that interrupted her childhood years before. 

Moving back and forth through time, Girl at War is an honest, generous, brilliantly written novel that illuminates how history shapes the individual. Sara Novic fearlessly shows the impact of war on one young girl--and its legacy on all of us. It's a debut by a writer who has stared into recent history to find a story that continues to resonate today.

Other reps:

Genres: #war #immigrant #historical 20th century #contemporary

My thoughts:

An award-winning novel about the Croatian war and one girl’s lasting trauma from it.

Review to come.

Link to buy