The Skin and Its Girl

Starred review from February 27, 2023
A young Palestinian American woman explores her identity in Cypher’s lush debut. Elspeth Noura Rummani is born in the U.S. in the early aughts during heavy bombing from the Israeli military. Her skin is blue, the same shade as the soap produced by her family’s factory in the West Bank, which is destroyed in the strikes, the last remnant of her family’s legacy in Palestine. In the present day, Elspeth considers emigrating to her lover’s unspecified homeland. Cypher frames Elspeth’s narration as a direct address to Elspeth’s great-aunt Nuha, who helped raise her and who’s recently died. Nuha’s a flamboyant presence, with her intimate knowledge of family history, brusque manner, and wealth of entertaining fables. Also, like Elspeth, Nuha was queer, though she kept this a secret from their family. Elspeth, though, hasn’t found acceptance because of her blue skin. As Elspeth considers whether she belongs in the U.S. or abroad, she meditates on the nature of skin to explore the contradictions between appearances and identity. It makes for a captivating stream of consciousness: “You were not a linear person, preferring to stuff your discomforts and difficulties inside eddies and convolutions.” With beautiful writing and evocative themes, this author makes a notable entrance. Agent: Adam Schear, DeFiore & Company.

March 15, 2023
The coming-of-age of a blue-skinned girl. Cypher's debut has quite a few moving parts: On the one hand, her narrator, Betty, is trying to reckon with her Palestinian American family's complicated history; on the other hand, Betty has blue skin. Another story thread has this queer narrator trying to decide whether or not to follow her partner around the world. Cypher doesn't seem to know exactly what novel she wanted to write--as a result, this book feels like several different stories smashed awkwardly together. The most interesting parts follow Betty's closeted queer aunt from Palestine to the U.S. as Betty tries to reckon with her own sexuality. But the fact of Betty's blue skin ("the pure cobalt of a gas flame," in Cypher's words) distracts from all that. Ultimately, it's unclear why Cypher bothered to veer into this magical realm. Betty's blue skin and a few other unreal details are not only unbelievable from the standpoint of our world; they don't really cohere even in Cypher's own invented universe. Yet another thread, about Betty's mother's mental illness and her complicated relationship with Betty's father, is never fully explored. Then, too, Cypher's syntax frequently becomes tangled in a way that seems to strive toward lyricism though it ends up simply opaque. "It's for the philosophers," Cypher writes, "whether two people can live in the exact same place if that place is imaginary--or maybe a poet could tell me whether any set of words is sturdy enough, on its own, to duplicate an experience from one mind to the next." Cypher can certainly be commended for her willingness to experiment in her fiction. Here's hoping that, in her next work, she doesn't forget the simple art of storytelling. An overdetermined novel that can't quite decide what notes it wants to strike.

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Starred review from March 1, 2023
The conceit of this stirring debut is that its protagonist, Palestinian American Elspeth, is standing at her great-aunt Nuha's grave, recalling the story of her own life from her extraordinary birth with amazingly cobalt-blue skin until the fourth grade. It's not easy being blue, and Elspeth's neuroscientist mother, Tashi, battling mental illness, is determined to keep her daughter a secret, but she reluctantly agrees to let Elspeth live for the first year of her life with extravagant, formidable, stubborn, and misanthropic Nuha, who is a born storyteller. Elspeth will learn from those stories the history of her family, the Rummanis, in Palestine. We learn, too, that Nuha is a lesbian, as is Elspeth. Decades before, when Nuha was still living in Palestine, she was a servant to the Rummanis, but--being considered one of the family after saving their youngest son from being burned alive--she is given, by the paterfamilias, a suit of skin to wear. Obviously, there are elements of magic realism in this captivating novel about the importance of family and story, but more importantly, the tale is enriched by the presence of fully realized, multidimensional characters. Near the end of the novel, a character observes that there is no truth except in old women's tales. The same thing is true in the pages of this splendid first novel.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.