I received this book in exchange for an honest review.

A dual narrative story. One is something you'd hear a storyteller spin, and the other is something that could (and is) happening now.

The first story takes place in 2011. Nour and her family have moved back to Syria after the death of her father because her mother thought it'd be easier to be closer to family. Reading this book in 2018 it's very easy to scream "WHY?!?!", but for them at the time, it seemed to be a wise decision. Nour's story tackles the shellings that happen in Syria in 2011, the Arab Spring in general, and the refugee crisis that it causes. It's heartbreaking and raw, but from the eyes of a child slowly losing her innocence.

The second story is a work of historical fiction taking place in the 1100's. It is about Rawiya, a young girl who pretends to be a boy so she can join the great (real) cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi as an apprentice. They're on a mission from King Roger (also real) to map parts of the Middle East. This story seems to be a tale that Nour's family told her and there are parallels as the stories go.

Each chapter starts with Rawiya's story and ends with Nour's. While both stories are interesting enough at the start, Nour's story became the story I wanted more of. I have to confess that I started skimming Rawiya and what her crew was going through just to get to Nour and her family faster. I'm obviously speaking for myself when I saw that I don't think both stories should have had equal weight. Rawiya's short have been firmly relegated to more of a story within a story. And I think ultimately, the distraction of switching between two stories brought the rating of the book down for me.

The Syrian Civil War is still happening. People are still dying. As of <a href="https://www.worldvision.org/refugees-news-stories/syrian-refugee-crisis-facts">November 2018</a>:
~13.1 million people in the country need humanitarian assistance.
~5.6 million Syrians have fled the country as refugees
~6.2 million people are displaced within Syria
~ 20,819 children killed
there's <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/world/middleeast/syria-death-toll.html">no consensus on death toll numbers</a> but "The last comprehensive number widely accepted internationally — 470,000 dead" was from 2016.

This story is heart breaking and hard, but it can't compare to what's actually happening. This book gives a story to all the numbers I spouted above.

I liked this, but I was never able to narrow down why I didn't love it. I think there was a disconnect between the two timelines-- the pacing felt mismatched. The modern-timeline-story was great in that it didn't seem overly dramatized, it didn't veer into feeling like hyperbole to emphasize the situation.

The prose in this book it beautiful. I loved this book and found it hard to put down. It tells the story of two girls from different cultures and is a breathtaking tale.

I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a review copy in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

This was a beautifully written book. Nour's family moves back to Syria after her Baba's (father's) death in NYC. Nour is the only one born in the US, with her two older sisters having been born in Syria. When the Syrian Civil War comes close to their neighborhood, and eventually bombs their home, they consider themselves lucky to be able to follow a path that should lead them out of Syria. About 800 years earlier, Rawiya disguises herself as a young boy so she can join and apprentice with the premier map maker of the time, Al-Idrisi. His small caravan heads off to map the Northern African and Middle Eastern countries and routes, a definitive work for Norman King Roger. As with many dual timeline narratives, I started out liking one better than the other. But as I continued into the story, it was so interesting how Nour's refugee journey took them through the same parts of the Mid East that the map maker's party had taken years earlier. The story of Rawiya's journey was a favorite tale and memory that Nour has from her father. Both sections are filled with a lot of action and anxiety. The descriptions of the area are beautiful, Nour's synesthesia brings color to a lot of the descriptions. But the plight of these refugees isn't easy and many catastrophic things happen along the way.

The summer of 2011 is one of great change for Nour. Her father has died from cancer, and her mother decides to move the family back home to Syria. Nour's older sisters quickly fall back into the rhythm of life in Homs, but Nour has never lived in Syria and finds it hard to adjust. Their neighborhood turns into a warzone before their eyes and when a shell destroys their house, they are forced to flee across borders. As Nour and her family travel, she remembers a tale that her father told her again and again: the story of Rawiya, the girl who dreamed of seeing the world and left everything she knew to go on incredible adventures. The two girls take the same journey, hundreds of years apart, fighting for their families and a place to call home.

The Map of Salt and Stars is a book that effortlessly spans age ranges--I thought it was compelling and beautiful, but can just as easily see giving it to a teen or mature middle-grade student to read. The writing in this novel is utterly unique because Nour has synaesthesia and experiences the world a bit differently than most. Joukhadar subtly reminds readers of the beauty of story and art and nature through our heroine's experiences.

The two narratives work wonderfully here--an entire novel could have been written about Rawiya or Nour but they add new layers to each other's stories. There is a beautiful juxtaposition between the magic of Rawiya's tale as she disguises herself as a boy and fights human and magical enemies and the devastating reality that Nour's family might not all make it to safety.

The Map of Salt and Stars is a truly beautiful debut novel that I will be talking about for a long time.

The Map of Salt and Stars
By Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
Touchstone May 2018
368 pages
Read via Netgalley

Beautiful! This powerful novel tells the story of Nour and her family, who move back to their parents’ homeland of Syria from Manhattan in 2011, after the death of Nour’s father. Nour is around eleven and, unlike her mother and older sisters, has never been to Syria. Just as she’s beginning to get her bearings, though, Nour’s home is destroyed by a rocket. The family is suddenly unmoored, refugees without a country and with only the barest sense of a destination.

In a parallel storyline, young Rawila leaves her home some 800 years prior and masquerades as a boy to apprentice herself to a famed mapmaker. Nour’s travels mirror those of Rawlia, as both search for home in uncertain worlds.

I loved this book! The Map of Salt and Stars is a beautifully written book about two girls living in 2 very different centuries. The writing on the sentence level is stunning. I highly recommend!

THE MAP OF SALT AND STARS by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar has a beautiful cover and contains a rich blending of two stories. One is set in the twelfth century and relates the adventures of Rawiya, a young girl who runs away from home and pretends to be a boy as she travels through the Middle East and Northern Africa with a famous medieval mapmaker. The other action concerns a preteen named Nour who is a present day refugee from Syria fleeing that war torn country with her family, covering much of the same geographical territory. Joukhadar's debut novel is extremely ambitious in that it relates two coming of age adventures, tackles contemporary issues and even explores the idea of synesthesia, or seeing and thinking in colors.

Some favorite quotes include:
Every place you go becomes a part of you. But none more so than home.
… stories ease the pain of living, not dying. People always think dying is going to hurt. But it does not. It’s living that hurts us.
You are the stories you tell yourself.
A red hard knot glues itself to my ribs like indigestion, the tangled-up knot of all the things I’ve loved that will be buried one day, all the things I know I am bound to forget.

THE MAP OF SALT AND STARS by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar received starred reviews from both Booklist and Kirkus. I certainly appreciate the skill exhibited in playing these two stories off of each other and frankly, I liked Rawiya's mythical tale and eagerly read those portions, but found it surprisingly difficult to develop a deep empathy for the contemporary characters, including young Nour. Coincidentally, I have just been talking with other teachers about looking for an updated version of books like Enrique's Journey. Exposing our students to the plight of today's refugees and the crises they face is critical; perhaps exploring those events separately would have resulted in a shorter novel and one that could have been used with classes? I have found suggestions to make for Senior classes like the essays in The Displaced or a more challenging novel like Go, Went, Gone, but welcome more ideas, especially for our younger students.

Combining fairy tale and family story, The Map of Salt and Stars brings us into the lives of a Syrian family displaced by war and takes us on a tour of the ancient and modern wonders of the middle east.

A story about Syrian refugees is naturally going to be heart wrenching, so be prepared. There are two storylines throughout the book and I strongly preferred one to the other. That mismatch did slow down my reading, but ultimately I would recommend it for it's unique perspective and writing.

"No one sees the future. No one knows what's planned. But safety is not about never having bad things happen to you. It's about knowing the bad things can't separate us from each other."

This powerful debut novel is full of beautiful moments, lyrical prose, and moving epiphanies. It’s a beautifully written tale that switches between the perspectives of a girl in modern Syria escaping the refugee crisis and a girl in medieval Syria traveling across the region as a map maker’s apprentice. The way their stories are intertwined is absolutely genius and creates such highs and lows. This book definitely deserves the comparison to The Kite Runner.

As I write this, a caravan of refugees from Central America awaits being granted asylum in the United States across the border from San Diego, and the travel ban imposed by the President is being considered by the Supreme Court. The plight of the refugee has never been more televised and debated than it is right now. I believe the Map of Salt and Stars is an important insight into humanizing the families and individuals who find themselves homeless and desperate due to political and economic circumstances for which there is no preparation. Where do you go when a missile destroys your home, your town, and your neighbors? Where do you go when all you have left are the clothes on your back and whatever you salvaged from the rubble? When your family is injured or killed? When no one around you wants you to be their "problem?" This is the terrible reality for Nour and her family who have recently returned to Syria from New York after the death of her father. As her family seeks a place to call home, Nour remembers her father's favorite story to tell, Rawiya, apprentice to a legendary mapmaker, who must disguise herself as a boy in order to travel the world and help her family. As Nour and Rawiya travel from country to country across the Middle Eastern landscape, each survives danger and terrors they never imagined existed in hopes of one day finding home again.

The Map of Salt and Stars is beautifully written and starkly heartbreaking. It explores the reality of tens of thousands of people in the world today and asks us to journey with them, if only for a few hundred pages, in hopes that we may know them better.

A topical and powerful setting for a debut novel, this book moves between two unique times: medieval Syria where a famous Muslim mapmaker and his legendary female apprentice fight mythical creatures, Crusaders, and the elements to map the world as it is known; and Syria in 2011, where a widowed mapmaker returns with her three teenage girls, after years in NYC, to find family and cultural connections, but runs straight into the Arab spring and a civil war. I struggled with the first half of this book, finding it hard to connect to either story. The 12th century story is rife with Arabic names of ancient places no longer heard of, as I found myself skipping the long descriptions. Once the story settled more on the characters and their quest to map the world, it was far more interesting. The modern tale is told through the eyes of 12 year old Nour, a daughter who grieves her father and suffers through unimaginable horror as her world is literally blown up around her. Yet it took until the second half to care deeply about this family. I wanted the author to dive deeper in their hearts, to flesh out more of the story through the characters rather than the plot. I do hope this author writes another book on Syria as I believe she has great potential for educating many of us on the need for more compassion, not a law banning refugees getting a hand up from America.

Oh my gosh this book is absolutely beautiful!! Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar’s writing is lyrical, music, a canvas that she paints in such vivid colors as you read.

The Map of Salt and Stars is the story of two stories in parallel, 800 years apart. Nour, a 12 year old Syrian-American, goes back to Syria with her mother and two sisters after her father dies in 2012, and then nearly dies herself when a bomb smashes her family’s home in Homs to rubble. Rawiya leaves her home disguised as a boy, and becomes Rami, to join Al-Idrisi a famous mapmaker and learn from him. Both girls start on a life-changing and harrowing journey through the Middle East and Northern Africa.

Nour has a form of synesthesia where everything becomes a color. Voices are colors, feelings are color, objects are described in color. It leads to some vivid, amazing descriptions. So many metaphors nestled within the narrative, I found myself often stopping for a minute to close my eyes and imagine the scene in my head. After a while you start thinking in color too, and it’s a truly amazing experience. Rawiya draws on legends of the past and Middle Eastern poetry to recreate a narrative that hovers between the mythical and the realistic, perfectly complementing Nour’s own experiences.

The descriptions of Syria, as well as the other areas that the girls travel through, are so beautiful, powerful, devastating. I love how both narratives follow the same journey, drawing the maps of the area as they go, watching, waiting, and seeking. I have personally spent quite a bit of time in areas close to where their feet travel and the descriptions in the book took me right back there, so much so that I could feel the sun on my head and feel the heat of the day through the soles of my feet. I loved reading the words “Wadi Araba” because I know exactly where that is without looking at a map, and can just imagine it now and 800 years ago. The map drawing narrative is incredible, just reading about how the lines were drawn, the travels that it took over land and sea to create maps that told us how vast our world was.

So many parts of this book had me in tears, and not just the obvious parts. Being an immigrant myself with an immigrant partner from a different country than I am from, there are so many areas in the story where I found my heart breaking because I too feel that, and we too have been there. Borders seem to be so much more important to some people than they are to others. I’m not a refugee, and therefore have not suffered from a forced departure like Nour, but the soul searching, home searching, and feelings of displacement I can relate to.

I think that Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar does an amazing job depicting the importance of understanding how one becomes a refugee, and of opening our eyes to why someone would leave their home country with only the clothes they are wearing, through such a beautiful and heartbreaking story. I seriously cannot recommend this book enough.

I see fireworks: red, blue, purple, green, with a shower of golden stars. The Map of Salt and Stars is amazing. Please read this book.

The Map of Salt and Stars will be published on May 1st by Touchstone. Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance copy. I will be buying this beautiful book in hardcover because I want to hold it in my hands and read it again and again. There are so many areas that I wanted to highlight and quote.