Habibi

Liyana Abboud is fourteen when her Palestinian American family moves from St. Louis to Jerusalem — her father's hometown, a city she has only known through his stories. What she finds is a place of extraordinary beauty and impossible tension: Israeli and Palestinian neighbors who share streets and markets and centuries of grievance, a Jewish boy she falls in love with, a grandmother whose memory holds everything the official history leaves out. Nye writes about Jerusalem with the precision and tenderness of someone who knows it from the inside — the smells, the light, the specific weight of a place where every stone is contested. The most important middle grade novel about Palestinian identity and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for this age group, and the one that most completely insists on the humanity of everyone living inside it.