I can see how this volume might have solid appeal for readers in their late 20s, early 30s. There are some lovely structures of language and phrasing in some of the poems that I found to be evocative and clear. But on the whole, I had to push myself to finish the entire collection as I found my attention wandering a bit. Good, but not great poetry.

3 Stars ( I received an e-arc from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review)

I had started reading this book a while ago and got about half way through and then re-started reading it recently. I had trouble with keeping focused on reading the collection without falling asleep, nothing against the author but if my brain isn't engaged in the story I tend to zone out and/or fall asleep. I made it about to the 60% mark before I had to put it down for the final time.

I definitely don't read as many poetry collections as I mean to anymore, but being 30 when it was released, I was intrigued enough by The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Aylan to pick it up. This short collection is about changes and relationships and places all over the world. There are some breath-taking lovely phrases and I appreciated reading from a perspective so different from my own. At the same time, The Twenty-Ninth Year wasn't incredibly memorable for me and didn't leave me with that gut-wrenching emotion that the poetry I truly fall in love with does. Aylan's writing is more subtle than that and it could feel a little repetitive at times. Not a favourite poet yet, but somebody who I would be interested in checking in on again in the future.⁣
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It's always fascinating to see new, fresh way the bildungsroman is revised through not just different genres but from different voices. Alyan gives us a poetry, a verse that is deeply intimate, a kind of portrait, while being able to gesture outwards to any of their generation creating a true familiarity in difference. one of the best works of the year.

I am twenty.-nine this year. This book came out of nowhere and made my life so much better. It was honest and raw, full of emotions and feelings. I loved the author's voice which was strongly seeking throuh all the poems. I learned a lot and I felt very connected.

I adored this novel! I think, as a 20-something, this was entirely powerful, and I am glad I am reading it now before I hit 29 and ask myself the same existentialist questions. Hala was a beautiful, eloquent writer, and her literary approach to introspection was phenomenal. It felt like a coming-of-age novel for adults.

This is a whirlwind breathtaking poetry collection where numbers root the poetic narrative ('I'm divisible only by myself') and boundaries blur and flicker between nationalities, countries, the body, cultures and the past, present and future. It reads like a highly personal and coming-of-age collection (culminating in the brilliant poem 'Thirty' – a poem that encompasses and represents her passage through life so far, as well as the poems). The collection is scattered with numbers, dates, distances and ages while fully embracing the cyclical nature of time (with future references mentioned in poems set in the past). It is through the specific nature of numbers that Alyan gathers whirling images, feelings and memories in order to attach her past selves to the present. Alyan's erotic poetic voice and technique are addictive, her poems address lovers, her husband, her parents and friends and her subject matter is varied and important. She handles issues such as alcoholism (about drinking and about not drinking), sexuality, sexual abuse and anorexia. This is a collection about the fluctuating nature of extremes and the search for happiness while incomprehensible brutalities (such as children dying in Aleppo and the undignified and harsh immigrant condition) continue to unravel on a parallel plane. This is made all the more poignant by the poet's own experience of immigration as a child. The collection is scattered with names of places where she has lived and several of the poems even take place on borders. Indeed, Alyan's collection reads as a way of writing her way home with a very definite gaze inwards by looking outwards, I loved the poems about her parents marriage and the impact of immigration upon love ('It takes a romantic to leave the city' – The Socratic Method), and being raised as a child of immigrants ('listening to my father mispronounce his meal'). A beautiful, touching and technically deft poetry collection, I highly recommend reading it, and rereading it and rereading it.

From the publisher blurb: "In Islamic and Western tradition, age twenty-nine is a milestone, a year of transformation and upheaval."

It's fitting that these poems all deal with the feeling of place and belonging, examining whether or not the poet is happy or where she wants to be, and who she wants to be with. Memories and dreams intertwine with the emotions of the moment, and a struggle with sobriety, and I really took my time to read and reread these poems.

Some of my highlights:

Armadillo
"...The Doha villa still makes me cry and it takes a decade to understand what my parents always knew: all the love in the world won't buy you what you wanted in the first place...."

You're Not a Girl in a Movie
"...there's always a dark darker than the dark you know."

Step Eight: Make Amends
"...Scream that he is an asshole, that there are girls you'd
be kissing if it weren't for him, that you are trying to
Pottery Barn your way to quiet...."

The Honest Wife
"...I lied and said I loved Philadelphia, but really I just loved the idea of a place so old it only knew how to tell the truth."

Heartfelt and heartrending, intentionally awkward, and frequently skewed in a way that makes the reader uncomfortable. Alyan does not pull her punches with her poetry, and as the reader, you must suffer through her intense (albeit frequently confusing) thoughts just as she did herself.

This powerful book of poems reads almost as a memoir, dealing with growing up, straddling different cultures, and trying to come to terms with society as a whole. Alyan succeeds in weaving jarring snapshots of trauma with haunting, and often hopeful, poetry.

Pros:
- I couldn't put this book down.
- Barthelmess took a hard subject and turned it into a book that I wanted to keep reading.
- It gave an honest insight into the foster care system.
- It had a happy ending, after all of the emotional blows that were thrown at Victoria.
- Look at that cover!

Cons:
- Nothing really, it was such a great book.

My Thoughts:  I went into this book blindly. I liked the cover and the title, and only read the first tiny bit of the synopsis. And I'm honestly glad that I did, because I didn't form any opinions on what I thought was happening in Victoria's home or anything like that before I started reading the book.

Being inside Victoria's head, you get a glimpse of what it's like to be inside the head of an abuse survivor. The grounding, the flashbacks, the blame and guilt, and finally the acceptance. It's all there. I felt that Victoria's character was so true-to-life and relatable that she almost seemed like a real person.

My favorite thing about this book was the slow acceptance - Victoria realizing that she was not at fault. coming to terms with living in a new town, and becoming closer to Connie. I'm so glad that this book ended on a good note, because it was so emotional and so hard to read at times. Victoria deserved that happy ending.

I would recommend this book to both kids in the foster system and readers who prefer more gritty YA.

The only reason this book didn't get 5 stars is because I don't think I'll read it again. It was fantastic, though.

After reading this book, I'm eager to read the rest of Hala Alyan's work! She has a searching, original voice full of loneliness, longing, and true fire. What I loved most about these poems is the way the speaker tells the story of her past selves to herself in order to forge a new future, a kind of self-mythology that is painfully beautiful and feels very familiar, as someone who had a similarly reckless traumatic girlhood. I'm so glad I read this.

I was so entranced by the idea that the 29th year is something particularly transformative in the Islamic culture. Being in my 29th year myself, I wanted to read something that would change my classic American pseudo-dramatic perception--29 is on the cusp of 30, a huge change of life's dynamic, especially for a woman. What I received from this collection was more unexpected--I learned about Hala Alyan. I learned about her journey figuratively around the earth, from Greece to Texas and almost everywhere in between. Hala knits so many unassumingly disconnected fragments together to display a descriptive tapestry of her questioning childhood, her screaming young adulthood, from alcoholism and drug use to family duty and marriage. She takes stereotypes and unwinds them in front of you.

Hala's poetry reminds me of my own teen years. Though I'm a 29 year old white agnostic female born and raised in America, I felt much of her path through adolescence as if it were my own. And then there were moments where I knew I was learning to see through eyes that have witnessed so much more than I have, through a woman who has lived and endured things I could never understand, and I appreciated the difference. I appreciated that I may never understand, but I could treasure the glimpse Hala Alyan gave me.

I very intimately enjoyed Hala Alyan's The Twenty-Ninth Year, though it might not be a read for everyone.