seen from China
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from China
seen from India
seen from Kazakhstan
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Yemen
seen from United States
Though they never had the words to unlock every last door of every last room of each other's interior, for a long time, the sense of parallel rooms was enough. The intimacy of two people knocking on either side of a wall.
Sarah Cypher, The Skin and Its Girl
Happy Arab American Heritage Month 2025!
It’s Arab American Heritage Month, and as always, we’re celebrating with books starring protagonists of Arab descent! Young Adult A Guide to the Dark by Miriam Metoui Something is building, simmering just out of reach. The room is watching. But Mira and Layla don’t know this yet. When the two best friends are stranded on their spring break college tour road trip, they find themselves at the…
The Skin and its Girl by Sarah Cypher, 2023.
The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns a vibrant, permanent cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis’ centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. View the full summary and rep info on wordpress or check it out for free from the Queer Liberation Library!
NEW BOOK SUBMISSION
THE SKIN AND ITS GIRL || SARAH CYPHER
the QBD gave me: The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher!!
I'm actually currently reading this book right now and I really like it! It's also the first queer Palestinian book I've gotten up on the QBD, which you will be able to find using the brand new Palestinian sorter in the filters!! I can't wait to get more up, I've just been a bit under the weather and haven't had the chance yet!
The Skin and Its Girl is a striking tale of identity told through the eyes of a Palestinian-American as she decides whether she should follow her heart and perpetuate her family's cycle of exile, or whether she shouldn't. As she decides, she comes across her aunt's journal and learns about what it took for her family to get where they are.
I can't wait to finish this book and I hope y'all give it a try too!
SUMMARY
In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns vibrantly, permanently cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis’ centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of their lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening back to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.
Decades later, Betty returns to Aunt Nuha’s gravestone, faced with a difficult decision: Should she stay in the only country she’s ever known, or should she follow her heart and the woman she loves, perpetuating her family’s cycle of exile? Betty finds her answer in partially translated notebooks that reveal her aunt’s complex life and struggle with her own sexuality, which Nuha hid to help the family immigrate to the United States. But, as Betty soon discovers, her aunt hid much more than that.
The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity, and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us—and wield even the power to restore a broken family. Sarah Cypher is that rare debut novelist who writes with the mastery and flair of a seasoned storyteller.
CONTENT WARNINGS
suicidal ideation, attempted suicide (off page), depression, miscarriage, racism, homophobia
REPRESENTATION
Palestinian American lesbian mc, Palestinian lesbian mc, Palestinian gay side characters
GOODREADS LINK LINK TO PURCHASE THE BOOK
tw: suicide attempts
I picture my mother like this whenever I need to feel more tender toward her: a scrawny girl, bare calves with a fuzz of dark hair, crouched in a skeletal house with the mice and scorpions, astonished by a ghostly chorus. That night outside Houston, she'd scrambled to the top floor, wondering whether the drop to the foundation was enough to crack open her head and let the voices out. A few years later in boarding school, she'd try a whole bottle of Tylenol. And in college on the California coast, she'd wonder, What about a gun? In Portland, she'd imagine the sound of a single shot from that revolver softened by miles of pine forest. None of it would ever stop the phenomenon and its fixations. From that earthy Texas night onward, as nostalgia preoccupies the exile, death played in my mother's thoughts like the promise of homecoming.
The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher
“All the old stories talk about the Road of No Return, the Road of Good Fortune, and the Road of this or that, but I’m seeing that a woman is not fully in possession of herself until there is no road at all, and she must make her own way. That is the problem. I was born roadless, heavy and blue and happiest in one place—content to let you tell me how the world is, and to retreat from any further, disappointing discoveries of my own. But love is nothing if not a catastrophe, one that makes me second-guess gravity, history, and the limits of my own person. Love is, might be, feels like, a kind of fairy tale too—one that can begin only once the story we thought we knew blows apart.”
The Skin and Its Girl · Sarah Cypher
Stories that counter-colonize the Western narrative and reclaim cultural agency
