Point of View

The novel is written from the first person point of view of Nima, a 15-year-old girl of Sudanese descent living in America. Nima is trapped between two worlds and she feels like she belongs to neither - her mother’s old world of Sudan, and her new world of the United States where she was born. She is without a father, losing him before she was born which makes her wonder what her life could have been like had he survived. She is bullied and assaulted at American school by islamaphobic classmates, and teased in Arabic class, making her feel like an outsider in both worlds. As Nima is also a teenager transitioning through puberty, her identity crisis is even more pronounced. This leads to Nima longing to be another girl who is more pretty, put together, and the theoretical daughter she thinks her mother...