Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist
mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches
for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother’s ghost has begun
to visit him each evening. As his grandmother’s sole caretaker, he spends his
days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his
estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime
crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to
paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as
Little Syria.
One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered
journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to
painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared
more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his
mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact,
Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s—and his grandmother’s—in ways
he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z’s story reveals the
histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he
never knew. Realizing that he isn’t and has never been alone, he has the
courage to officially claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare.
As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City
skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what
happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following
his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by
his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family
that was there all along. [from Fantastic Fiction]
Joukhadar, Zeyn. (2020). The Thirty Names of Night. New York: Atria Books.
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