Living an ordinary life in a nation at war is not easy…to say the least. Add to that the members of your family breaking away to the join revolutionary Jihadi forces and an incomplete romance (also thanks to war), and you end up in the unique situation of Nidal, the protagonist of Dr. Sahar Khalifeh’s “My First and Only Love.”

When Nidal, an exiled Palestinian artist, returns to her family home in the city of Nablus in the West Bank years later, she travels down memory lane. Nidal grew up in 19

Living between cultural lines has never been easy. Doing so in a time of conflict and prejudice while coping with loss is even more difficult.

Shadi, the protagonist of Tahereh Mafi’s novel “An Emotion of Great Delight“, is an Iranian-American girl living in New York City in 2003. Her brother Mehdi recently died in a car accident, her father is dying, her best friend Zahra is shunning her and Shadi is developing a romance with Zahra’s brother.

In the midst of negotiating a broken heart, Shadi

On December 17, 2021, students across the nation were bound together by a viral threat on social media.

I first learned about the threat the night before from a friend’s text. My friend attends a public school in the Fort Bend Independent School District (ISD) in Texas, and he sent me a screenshot of the ISD website. Blazoned across the homepage was an announcement declaring that students would not be allowed to bring backpacks to school on December 17, due to threats to the school’s security.