I really enjoyed THE COIN by Yasmin Zaher! It’s a fantastic debut novel that I found witty and weird which is an awesome combination. I liked how all the characters were over the top and how the main character, a young Palestinian woman, was obsessive about her extensive bathing rituals. The whole Birkin buying scheme was really fun to read about. I loved the settings of New York and Paris and the short chapters. I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the luxury world against the main character’s homeless friend. I found this a very compelling novel of an unraveling woman. I was excited to read this again on audio and the audiobook narrator Sarah Agha was good although maybe it was just her accent but some brands and words were pronounced differently.

I'll start by saying the audio was great and the novel worked well in that format. Sarah Agha captured the tone of the MC really well, and her sort of detached tone worked very well with the story.
I'm not sure how much it'll appeal to people who crave likable characters and neat explanations, it's definitely more for people who like to read between the lines. I really enjoyed it and I've been thinking about it since finishing it!

Messy Female Protagonist Fan ™️, here. This book is giving Batuman and Moshfegh vibes, for sure.

And honestly, the description doesn’t do this book justice. This is so much more than a girl that resells a couple of Birkin bags. This is the story of a Palestinian woman attempting to live in America even though her entire family has tried to before her and ended up back home. She’s wealthy, fastidious, and privileged yet also teaches underprivileged kids in her job. She flits from person to person and situation to situation, bringing her neuroses along for the ride.

She unravels (though not sure she was ever quite “raveled”) throughout the book, confronting her excessive cleaning rituals, her unhealthy relationship with luxury goods, her basic ineptitude as a teacher, her dependency on shady relationships, and much more, bless her.

There’s so much rich commentary on capitalism and colonialism too and you see the myriad of ways that they have seeped into her life and formed her ideologies.

This book is not going to be for everyone. It’s mostly an interior book, with not much plot but a whooooole lot of stream-of-consciousness character development, which I’m a gigantic fan of. It’s weird and wonderful.

This book simply wasn’t for me. The premise was so interesting, but the narration was so chaotic and it was difficult for me to really make sense of. I think this book is probably better suited for readers who appreciate a more conceptual story

The Coin is an intriguing novel with a unique premise, but it left me with mixed feelings. The story of a young Palestinian woman navigating life in New York and getting caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags definitely grabbed my attention. I appreciated how the book tackles complex themes like materialism, trauma, and identity, offering a fresh perspective on the immigrant experience.

However, the pacing felt uneven, with some parts dragging while others moved too quickly. The protagonist's journey is compelling, but her unraveling sometimes felt too chaotic and hard to follow. The blend of luxury with the harsh realities of her life is interesting, but the contrast could have been explored with more depth.

Overall, The Coin is a thought-provoking read with strong moments, but it didn’t fully resonate with me.

It’s rare that I read a book and am at a complete loss for how to review it. Typically, even the most tedious books evoke a sense of boredom that’s easy to express. This, however, no words. I think that there was some profound messaging in this story, but whatever that messaging was was completely lost on me. This book was chaotic and cringe inducing. There was a lot that seemed implausible to me and with the unreliability of the narrator, maybe that’s part of the point. I just honestly couldn’t tell you.

I struggled with how to rate this book. I didn’t hate it, but I also didn’t get it. It’s entirely possible that it’s my own failing and not the books’. I will just end by saying that, I love an acid-trip style literary fiction, the deterioration of the MCs mental state, and eccentric story telling styles, but if the messaging is muddled so severely that the majority of readers don’t get it, how successful has the book been?

The narrator on the audiobook did a great job of conveying the MCs state and matching the pace of the writing.

All in all, I’ve decided a 3 is fair here. The technical aspects of the writing were good, the character was distinct, and I got all the way through the book because it kept me curious. I just felt like I didn’t understand why this book was written or what the author was ultimately trying to say.

This book is not for everyone, I'll start there. I'm not sure how to recommend it and who to recommend it to. But it most certainly is for me! This is one of those experiences where I finished and thought, "wtf did I just read?" but not in the way I tend to do, because the book is weird or gross. Instead, it's more because it's aimless and unexpected.

The Coin is a jarring, unsettling novel with a protagonist who doesn't even try to be likable and is not the most reliable. Her opinions often seem provocative for the sake of being provocative, and I imagine a lot of people won't like that. She's messy, the other characters are messy, there is no one to root for really but there is also no plot to be found.

All of this sounds like I did not enjoy the book; trust me, I did! Give me an aimless, quirky book with messy characters all day every day, please and thank you.

This book will find its audience, I'm pretty sure of it. And it will probably stumble along the way.

This book was certainly unconventional, but that's what I loved about it! The stream of consciousness style kept me on my toes. And the narrator was certainly problematic at times, but I think it's refreshing to read a narrative from inside the head of someone that is not perfect. Most narrators in fiction are written in a way that is idealized, but every once in a while, I enjoy a book from more chaotic perspective. Plus, I love an unreliable narrator, because it makes me REALLY think critically as I'm reading. It takes a special talent for an author to artfully make the reader feel actual discomfort, which this author was very skilled at. I'll be keeping an eye out for Yasmin Zaher books now!

This book was kind of all over the place. It sounded good from the description - a Palestinian immigrant teacher living in NYC but the stream of consciousness, rapid fire narration wasn't for me. I felt like there wasn't much of a plot but I did like that the FMC was queer and her obsession with cleaning and looking at the city through her eyes was interesting. There was a big focus on fashion and I would have enjoyed more insights into her life as a foreign teacher. Just an okay read for me but the narration was good and it was a quick read. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an early audio copy in exchange for my honest feedback!

The Coin falls into the category of 'hot mess' literary fiction about women on the edge-- they're usually liberal-minded, intellectual, city-dwelling women who are slowly unravelling as they're stuck in dead-end jobs for which they're overqualified and underappreciated, suffering the slings and arrows of dating and mildly toxic men, withering away due to a lack of social connection, and struggling to make ends meet financially. But unlike many of the others that have gone before it, Yasmin Zaher's take on this specific niche delves into the dirty depravity of its main character's mind. It refuses to be quirky, instead seemingly taking an odd pride in the stench, the filth, that underpins this character as she explores her sexuality and those primal urges. In its searingly honest, if disturbing, manner, it is relatable, though it never really invites you in. Zaher's writing is evocative, but frustratingly opaque at times, as she challenges her readers to consider what is actually happening, and what it all means. There's not a ton of plot and the central characters remain ambiguous, even with all of their specificity and idiosyncrasies, but there is so much to unpack. Ironically, it would be difficult to explain what this book is about, yet it is also the kind about which you could write essays-- even whole theses-- in an attempt to parse out and analyze. It offers commentary on sexuality and being a woman-- the complexities, the hypocrisy, the impossible expectations, the judgment; inherited wealth and capitalism as it affects (and infects?) individuals; OCD and insidious, but undiagnosable mental issues; the pressure of one's own ideologies, and the effects of never quite measuring up to the idealized picture of yourself and the world, that fantasy which you've created in your own head; the slippery nature of reality and inability to pin anyone or anything down. I could go on and on, but instead, I would just encourage you to read Zaher's take on it all, in her own words.
While this is not an easy book, and I suspect it will be quite polarizing, if it finds its audience, I think it will be well-received.