Contemporary Authors

• Sonora ( novel) Soho Press (New York, NY), 2017

1. Sonora LCCN 2016038000 Type of material Book Personal name Assadi, Hannah Lillith, author. Main title Sonora / Hannah Lillith Assadi. Published/Produced New York, NY : Soho Press, 2017. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm ISBN 9781616957926 (paperback) CALL NUMBER PS3601.S74 S66 2017 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Hannah Lillith Assadi - https://hannahlillithassadi.com/about/

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  Hannah Lillith Assadi received her MFA in fiction from the Columbia University School of the Arts. She also attended Columbia University for her bachelor's where she received the Philolexian Prize for her poetry and fiction and graduated summa cum laude. She was raised in Arizona and now lives in Brooklyn. Sonora is her first novel.

• Library Journal - http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2017/05/books/fiction/hannah-lillith-assadi-crosses-the-artlife-divide-debut-spotlight/

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  You are here: Home / / Hannah Lillith Assadi: A Lyricist at Heart | Debut Spotlight
  Hannah Lillith Assadi: A Lyricist at Heart | Debut Spotlight
  BY KATE GRAY ON MAY 9, 2017 1 COMMENT

  Photo by Ulysse Payet
  Hannah Lillith Assadi’s first novel, Sonora (LJ 4/15/17), is a lyrical coming-of-age story about best friends Ahlam and Laura, who attempt to escape to New York City only to find that their troubled pasts have caught up to them there. Below, Assadi discusses poetry, the divide between life and art, and biblical influences.
  In your novel, you use an epigraph from the Bible’s Book of Jonah. Why did this particular story speak to you?
  One of the central questions of the novel is whether the sequence of deaths is following Laura and Ahlam like a curse or whether their self-destructive behavior leads them to tragedy. I’ve always loved the Jonah story, but what I remembered from childhood was only about him living inside the belly of the whale. There is this whole other part that I found so beautiful in rereading it that’s applicable to Sonora. Jonah knows that no matter how far he runs from his God, the seas won’t calm until the crew throws him overboard. He repents and then is reborn anew. I plotted Ahlam to follow this trajectory, albeit in very different terms.
  How much of the book is based on your experience? Was it therapeutic to write?
  Ahlam and I are alike in many ways: we share a cultural background, we both experienced a fair amount of exposure to death growing up in Arizona, and we both love to dance. Outside of these broad strokes though, our shared experience ends. I never knew a person like Laura, though she is a conglomerate of friends, romances, and even of the darkest parts of my own personality. My father doesn’t chase aliens; I went to college and graduate school, and I never did quite as many drugs.
  Since I was young, there has been a lot of pressure on me to write into my background (being half Jewish/half Palestinian), as if I might have a solution to the conflict between the two groups by virtue [of my heritage]. In this book, I wanted to heighten the weight of those facts on Ahlam. Ahlam has semi-prophetic visions, which, in the end, do nothing to save her or her friends. It’s as if she has this magic power that is simultaneously impotent.
  Your story includes myths and rituals from many cultures. Were any of these culled from your own life?
  I read things ranging from local Arizona legends and mythology, such as the La Llorona skin-walkers in Navajo culture, to accounts of the Phoenix Lights [supposed UFO sighting]. I read about the coyote and its symbolic role in local tribal lore, Apache stories about the Superstition Mountains, and the odd disappearances that have plagued that range. Some were things I heard about growing up, but much of it I discovered as I went along.
  Your prose is very poetic. Do you write poetry, or are there poets who have influenced you?
  I have written poetry, and it is probably instinctually what I am most inclined to write. That said, I have tremendous respect and need for narrative, so trying to find a balance between a good story and poetic prose has always been my aim. There have been so many influences, but to name a few: Mark Strand, Yehuda Amichai, Mahmoud Darwish, Federico García Lorca, and Ted Hughes.
  Ahlam’s father teaches her to disguise her name and homeland when asked about her background. Did you encounter prejudice growing up?
  As a child, I definitely didn’t advertise that my father was a Palestinian and Muslim. Owing to the color of my skin, it was easier to hide this. I remember after 9/11, people who looked more “Arabic” than me (i.e., browner) were harassed. For the most part, aside from the occasional racist comment, I grew up more or less unscathed.
  Why did you choose to construct the narrative in chapters based on months?
  I wanted the chapters to be imbued with a sense of recurring seasons. In Arizona, August is afflicted with monsoons; I’ve always felt February to be the coldest month; and April is the cruelest, full of rain. These three months repeat themselves in the story. I wanted the structure to reflect the girls’ flight to NYC that never quite resolves in true liberation from their past—April returns and is even crueler, as it were.
  You describe New York City and its inhabitants so articulately. As Laura says, it’s “home.” Did you feel this way when you arrived in the city?
  I moved here to attend Columbia University, but it wasn’t until after I left college that I got to know [the city]—and perhaps only then did I really feel it deeply as my home. Every day, I consider leaving and living elsewhere, and maybe one day, I will, but this place has a way of always tugging me back into its clutches.—Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA

  This article was published in Library Journal. Subscribe today and save up to 35% off the regular subscription rate.
  FILED UNDER: BOOKS, FEATURED, FICTION, LJ IN PRINT TAGGED WITH: HANNAH LILLITH ASSADI, LJ_2017_MAY_15, SOHO CRIME, SONORA DISCUSSION: VIEW 1 COMMENT
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  Katie D says:
  May 11, 2017 at 10:40 am
  I remember the Jonah story from my childhood as well. This sounds like a very deep book. Really looking forward to checking it out. I also think the chapters based on months is an interesting way to do it. Looking forward to this book.

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• The Brooklyn Rail - http://brooklynrail.org/2017/05/books/This-Ever-Migrating-Curse

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  BOOKS MAY 1ST, 2017
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  INCONVERSATION
  This Ever-Migrating Curse:
  HANNAH LILLITH ASSADI with Sean Madigan Hoen
  Hannah Lillith Assadi
  Sonora
  (Soho Press, 2017)

  You might call Hannah Lillith Assadi’s first novel, Sonora, a work of superstitious realism. Though the book’s events are grounded in reality and plausibility, its narrator, Ahlam, is a young woman of such elegiac, mystic perception that one comes away from her story as if awaking on a post-lysergic morning: memories feel slanted and opaque, scenes haunted and possibly dreamed. In Sonora, cause-and-effect seems reliant on soul rather than science and the departed (whether people or past-selves) don’t feel definitively gone—they linger energetically in mind and spirit. Ahlam believes she’s cursed; the reader wonders if she’s a person gifted with heightened senses, an empath of rare insight.

  Her voice is difficult to pull away from, and is a perfect guide.

  Sonora’s elliptical narrative follows Ahlam and her goth-tinged, oblivion-seeking counterpart, Laura, as they journey from their suburban home in the Arizona desert, “a land wrought for ghosts,” to the bohemian outskirts of early-aughts Brooklyn. Attempting to flee a “curse” brought on by the unexpected tragedies inflicted on Ahlam’s teenage lovers, the young women—both aspiring artists—find themselves adrift in a new city, either consummating their foretold misfortunes or faced with altogether new hauntings. Interspersed are flash-forward, present-day scenes depicting Ahlam and her mother in an Arizona hospital as they endure long, uncertain hours waiting for her father to regain consciousness following a risky surgery.

  Thematically and spiritually, these pieces wrap together in a way that encapsulates a portrait of a young woman’s otherworldly journey through the harshest realities of love, family, friendship, and youthful oblivion.

  What compels this mesmerizing novel is Assadi’s enchanted prose and her narrator’s liminal observations about family history, desire, and relationships in which the lines between self and “other” blur, sometimes beautifully, sometimes tragically. It’s not a story of a young woman finding herself, but, rather, dancing to the edge of the abyss and peering down, looking deeply, and ultimately realizing she cannot save those who’ve crossed over—only carry them with her as the dream of sentient life continues.

  Sean Madigan Hoen (Rail): So, Hannah, Sonora is your first book, and by the time this interview runs it will be available for all to read. I’m wondering how you’re feeling about that and, more specifically, if your impression of the novel has changed since you “let go” of it and turned it over for publication?

  Hannah Lillith Assadi: The day I went to the Soho offices and held the galley in my hand for the first time, I felt estranged from the book. Here was this beautiful object I was holding, the thing I had been working to achieve, contained inside a real jacket (it was nearly a real book!)—and at that instant, I also knew it wasn’t mine at all any longer. I think, ever since that day, I began to let it go as something that was mine, and started to think of it as something that was once mine…sort of like the lingering feelings we have for exes. I love everyone I’ve ever loved but not with the passion I once did. Also, I haven’t been able to read it all the way through since I received the galley. Maybe one day I’ll be able to, but not now.

  Rail: Your novel covers a dramatic few years in the life of its narrator, Ahlam, and is organized in seven sections, each detailing a particular month. There’s an elliptical use of backstory, as well, within the sections. You often hear writers talk about a book’s form “revealing” itself through the work, but I wondered if Sonora’s structure might have been more preemptively deliberate, relating, perhaps, to some aspect of the “curse” that permeates the story? Could you talk about your process in structuring the book?

  Assadi: The structure was very important to me. The “August, February, April” sequence of chapters repeats itself until the final chapter, “October,” the only autumn month to appear. I wanted it to feel recursive, the curse functioning like a wave spreading its echoes through time. Though all the characters move away from their origin points in time and space, they also repeatedly return to those origin points whether willingly or not, and their ends are written in their beginnings: the father searches for his ship home to Palestine; the last time we see Laura, her face is covered with mascara, she’s wearing a grey dress, as she is in the first vision Ahlam has of her on the mountains, etc. The only break from that cycle is at the very end when a new month, also coinciding with a new Jewish year in the book, arrives and then of course with that new beginning, the novel must end.

  Rail: That’s so fascinating. I felt there was a secret logic at work but I couldn’t crack the code. I love that it’s not overstated, that it’s a practically hidden device.

  Assadi: I guess there was also just an intuitive poetry to the months themselves for me: August always being the time of monsoons in the desert; February (at least until this last one) always being the coldest, snowiest month in New York; April, “the cruelest,” but also when things bloom in both the desert and the city.

  I think that this structure was the only thing I knew from the very beginning and the only thing that remained intact over the course of the various (many) drafts. It’s almost as if I wrote the book for the sake of its structure. Strangely, the new thing I’m working on has been developing oppositely. The structure has been revealing itself as I’ve been treading along, which is terrifying but also exciting.

  Rail: Ahlam’s “curse” could be read as a symptom of the narrator’s pathology. Her family history, after all, is rife with superstitions: a father who’s seen “a lot of ghosts, angels,” and who drives at night hoping to glimpse astral visions; a mother whose “pact of sadness” with her husband sustains a martial unhappiness that Ahlam perceives as “special… holy.” On the other hand, as Ahlam’s friendship with Laura deepens, tragedy begins to unfold in ways so haunting and synchronous it might cause even the sanest character to reckon with the notion of “curse.” (Not to mention that Laura deems Ahlam “a witch.”) Can you speak to your perception of curses; or, if it’s more apropos, the book’s perception of curses?

  Assadi: This goes to the very heart of what I was trying to figure out in this book (if all books revolve around questions rather than answers, which I think they do). The parents’ marriage, and what lies behind it (the Jewish diaspora resolving itself in the Palestinian) is something, because of my own background, I thought about a lot. What is the history of humanity but this ever-migrating curse? A similar cultural clash and its consequences also informs Laura’s character: on one side, she is of the pioneering European settler coming to the new land for a better life, and on the other, she is from the indigenous people whose land was stolen among other atrocities, as a result of that arrival. The founding of both lands (Israel/ United States), and maybe all lands, seem in their very inception, cursed. The tragic deaths that seem to shadow Laura and Ahlam are in some sense a reckoning with the angry ghosts that crowd their ancestral pasts.

  Rail: I hadn’t thought about it like that; at least not consciously. I love how multidimensional it is, the “curse.”

  Assadi: I’m probably being too heavy-handed! But, on a less global level, it would have been a much different book if it resolved with the reader knowing that Laura really was a witch who cast these spells on the men the two girls meet, or if the narrator really was supernaturally cursed, or the desert was haunted by one specific ghost like La Llorona, but that isn’t the case for them as it isn’t in life. Life is a fairy tale absent of the wicked witch and the charming prince.

  At the same time, isn’t it more beautiful to believe that our suffering might be guided by an intangible, malevolence, rather than just being random? There is solace in finding a pattern between things which the girls in this book, like the mother and father characters, cling to, however darkly. And I’d prefer some solace for my characters as I prefer it, however obscurely in my own life, by pretending there is a certain architecture, or “life story,” to the numbered days I have on this planet.

  Rail: In Laura I met a uniquely complex yet somehow familiar, almost archetypal character: the precocious, poetic, beautifully-damned friend who lures you towards both self-discovery and destruction at once. What, to your mind, is the ultimate gift Laura is able to give Ahlam?

  Assadi: It’s funny, because obviously there are autobiographical aspects of this novel, so many people ask me: who’s Laura? And the answer is that she’s pure fiction but also that she’s so many people I have loved intensely, for better or worse. So, what’s the productive answer to that sort of love? I don’t know. I’ve asked that of myself many times, sometimes wishing I could erase years of my life “wasted” on someone. But maybe it’s the people who bring you to the edge who are the ones who see who you really are, what you’re made of on the brink, what your demon looks like, what your angel looks like. Maybe the Lauras of the world are more primal, more true in their inability to function inside the rules. Fundamentally, I’m not a moralist in this regard, though I like to keep those I love around, and it’s also true that the Lauras of the world don’t stick around for long.

  Rail: While it’s a pedantic question about a novel like Sonora, I’m not surprised that people find it impossible to refrain from asking about the extent to which you mined your own experience…

  Assadi: I come from a similar background as my protagonist (though my mother is not Israeli). And like my protagonist I grew up in Arizona, where at my own high school many kids passed away, albeit in very different ways than drawn in the novel. The experiment here was in some ways to take certain facts of my own life, and see how those facts might be worn by someone with a slightly different nature. Also, there are many ways in which I am very much like Laura, have lived inside Laura’s skin, though to a reader glancing between my bio and the novel, that’d probably be a lot less obvious! The two represent a sort of split in me that I’ll probably never be able to talk about straightforwardly.

  Rail: The book is also, in its way, very much about place. I’ve heard it said that a person—writers, especially—doesn’t understand their home until they leave. Was this book, in some way, a means of understanding your relationship between your home in Arizona and your life in New York?

  Assadi: I think that despite the fact I’ve called New York home for the last twelve years (also I was born here and lived here the first five years of my life), part of me will forever long for the desert. Sometimes that’s resolved by taking the train out to the Rockaways or Long Island and seeing the ocean. But the desert is unique, and unique in the way it can be haunting, perhaps because it hosts a lot of memories for me. My next book is set by the ocean, though. And I’m longing to immerse myself further into it, so opposite to the desert, and in some ways so similar. Place to me as a writer is perhaps my most important “toolset,” equal only to my dreams which I transcribe every morning that I remember them.

  Rail: Your depictions of 2001 Brooklyn—Gowanus, in particular—also feel like evocations of a bygone time and place. Do living spaces like Dylan’s loft still exist for young drifters and artists arriving to Brooklyn? Have the rapid changes to the borough influenced your treatment of those scenes?

  Assadi: I was lucky enough to live in two spaces like that depicted in the book in my early years in Brooklyn. I guess they still exist, though probably not for three or four hundred dollars in rent. People live in lofts in Williamsburg and pay more money for them, I’d bet, than I make in a month. They were magical for me, and formative, and I imagine they will, at least in the iteration I knew them, soon disappear if they haven’t already. So yes, there was a certain nostalgia in the way I treated Dylan’s home in the book. I’ve been lucky enough to call the same place home for the last four years, on the top floor of a brownstone which I share with my boyfriend, but still sometimes, I long for that communal feeling of living in those spaces as I did in my early twenties, though I probably wouldn’t be able to handle now the winter I lived without heat and hot water!

  Rail: The novel ends with a literal and figurative farewell, and the sense that Ahlam has confirmed something she’s perhaps always known, or possessed, however deliciously elusive that possession might be to the reader. Where does Ahlam go next?

  Assadi: Ahlam’s journey ends with Sonora. That’s the sadness of every book’s end. But if I could imagine an epilogue for her, she’d be reunited, in love, and living with the mysterious man who speaks to her on the train platform before she leaves New York for good. And they’d live a long life together until they were old. Happily ever after.

  Rail: As for the rest of us: is it possible to escape our curses and should we be trying to?

  Assadi: Do I believe we escape our past? Yes and no. Depends on the day.

  Rail: Finally, it’s a small detail, but one that struck me. You signed off after the novel’s last sentence: Hannah Lillith Assadi, Paris 2016. For me, the gesture recalled writers of yore, like Henry Miller, for whom the place in which they composed their material was somehow essential to the content. Was it important that you finished the book in Paris? Did it inform the work in any obvious way?

  Assadi: This was the way I signed off on the galley (it was removed from the final printing) because for every single version of this book I made a note of where I was and the date, until the last final version where I felt it was important to remove any mark of myself and where I’d been on that final page. But as a biographical note, Paris is the place where I wrote my first novel by hand many years ago. That novel will never be published, I’m sure of that. Or at least I hope it won’t! But it’s an important city to me for that reason. I walked it for a few months, visited every cemetery, and rested with a little red wine and my large leather-bound black journal and wrote that awful, sentimental first novel. But what wasn’t awful was getting to know Paris, which as many have said before me, is so very beautiful.

  CONTRIBUTOR

  Sean Madigan Hoen

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• Carolineleavitville - http://carolineleavittville.blogspot.com/2017/03/hannah-lillith-assadi-talks-about.html

  CAROLINELEAVITTVILLE
  NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLING NOVELIST, SCREENWRITER, EDITOR, NAMER, CRITIC, MOVIE ADDICT AND CHOCOHOLIC

  THURSDAY, MARCH 30, 2017

  Hannah Lillith Assadi talks about Sonora, coming of age in both the desert and New York City, love, sex, and so much more

  “A lyrical meditation on the confusion and awe of growing up that is made beautifully strange by the desert’s haunting presence . . . both typical and painfully, relatably fresh . . . Lyrical, raw, and moving.”
  —Kirkus Reviews

  See the high praise above from the notoriously cranky Kirkus? Sonora is a fever dream about coming of age, that moves from the desert to New York City. About fleeing the past, finding your present, and change, it's a remarkable narrative that frankly keeps haunting me.

  Hannah Lillith Assadi received her MFA in fiction from the Columbia University School of the Arts. She was raised in Arizona by her Jewish mother and Palestinian father

  I always want to know what was specifically haunting you that led you to write this luminous novel?
  The origin of this novel is in a final assignment for a seminar I took during my MFA years with Rivka Galchen themed around James Joyce’s gorgeous story “The Dead”. I had known many people who passed away tragically at my high school and wrote a piece about those we lost in those years as a backdrop to a story of a failed relationship with a man I loved then. I finished that very short piece in one night. The next morning I received a message from a friend from high school informing me that an old classmate of ours had been killed in a car accident (the accident happened at the same time I was writing the piece). It was eerie and that’s when I knew I had an obligation to the material. From that kernel, it developed into a fuller length narrative which I submitted as my MFA thesis. Six months after submitting my thesis, the man I mentioned (the love object of the original piece) passed away suddenly. And then I tore the thesis apart and began to shape it into more or less the form it holds now. All to say, there are a lot of ghosts contained in the novel’s pages, though none appearing as they did in life!
  What kind of writer are you? Was there ever a moment when you felt you couldn't keep writing, or you had taken a wrong turn? And if so, how did you deal with it?
  Aside from every day? HA. But seriously, I have just arrived into the book writing career, and if I am fortunate that career will be long, and Sonora is only my debut. Definitely, though, I was more assured writing it than I have been say in the new novel I am working on now. I am more hesitant, more doubtful. As for process I tend to write very quickly and then go back over my work many times over. There are hundreds of drafts of Sonora.
  So much of this gorgeous novel is about coming of age even as you are haunted by the past. Can you talk about the dangers of coming of age, what we lose sometimes in doing so?

  I think youth, if we are open to its experiences, is absolutely terrifying. Thankfully when we are young we don’t know how dangerous and vulnerable we are. This novel happens to take place in the narrator’s life between her childhood and her early 20s, but in my own life it was in my early 20s that I took the most risks. Coming of age is in most cases a necessity. The alternative is early death? But it saddens me that as we age we lose our brazen ability to fall in love, walk into a night with passion and excitement. We lose a lot growing up. We also gain a lot, and I wouldn’t exchange the calmness and wisdom accompanying it for all the wild days in my past.

  Your language is so strikingly poetic. Which comes first for you--the words or the character?

  Thank you! Actually dreams come first for me. I need to have a visual in mind to write anything at all. I’m very reliant on my night time imagination and dreams have this way of communicating our emotions into such vivid pictures. Once I have a scene in mind, then I use the best words I can find to describe it. For instance much of the inspiration for the prose in Sonora revolves around a dream I had as a child of a girl hanging upside down from a cactus in the middle of a monsoon. In the book, I wrote that as a vision the narrator has of Laura on the mountains. That visual became the seed I relied on when I didn’t know where to go next.

  What's obsessing you now and why?
  Like many others right now, I am pretty consumed by the state of this country, and trying to combat feelings of imminent doom. But in my writing life, I’m working on something set by the ocean which surprise-surprise has an end of the world vibe. It delves a little further into magical territory. So once I’m done with a few of the book engagements I have for Sonora, I am very much looking forward to getting back to working on it and being in its watery realm.
  What question didn't I ask that I should have?

  Maybe what advice would I give to other writers trying to get their first books published?
  My answer would be never give up, and never compromise (too much) on your vision!
  Caroline, such an honor to chat with you. Thank you.

  POSTED BY CAROLINE AT 7:08 PM
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  Stay tuned, THIS OTHER LIFE has sold to Algonquin, my beloved publisher and I am busy writing it now. My 11th novel CRUEL BEAUTIFUL WORLD is an Indie Next Pick. IS THIS TOMORROW was an May Indie Pick. I'm also the New York Times bestselling author of PICTURES OF YOU, a San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick, a Costco "Pennie's Pick." a NAIBA bestseller and on the Best Books of 2011 List from San Francisco Chronicle, Providence Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Bookmarks Magazine. I'm the recipient of a New York Foundation of the Arts Grant in Fiction. I was a 2013 finalist in the Sundance Screenwriting Lab and a finalist in the Nickelodeon Screenwriting Fellowship, four of my novels were optioned for screen, and I talked my way into writing the script for two of them. My essay, HIgh Infidelity, has been optioned for film. I'm a book critic for The San Francisco Chronicle and People Magazine. I teach novel writing for UCLA Extension Writers' Program, and Stanford online, do private fiction editing, and I am a professional namer! I live with my husband, writer/editor Jeff Tamarkin and we beam with pride about our son, an actor/filmmaker in college. Visit me at http://www.carolineleavitt.com.
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9/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Assadi, Hannah Lillith: SONORA
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Assadi, Hannah Lillith SONORA Soho (Adult Fiction) $16.00 3, 23 ISBN: 978-1-61695-792-6
A coming-of-age story set largely in the surreal desert-world of Phoenix.In this atmospheric debut, protagonist Ahlam's
identity crisis is clear from the start--she's the daughter of an Israeli woman and a Palestinian refugee; a high school
misfit; a dreamer of strangely prophetic fever dreams. So when she meets Laura, a musician and rebel who seems to
exist outside their school's social structure, it isn't surprising that the two find solace in each other. Ahlam and Laura
fall into a close friendship, confiding in one another about their broken home lives; discovering drugs and sex; and
meeting the enigmatic Dylan, an older artist from New York City. Meanwhile, strange things are happening in the
desert: mysterious blue lights occasionally appear across the nighttime sky, spotted by some, including Ahlam's father,
and an unexplained series of deaths and suicides spreads through the high school. Fearing they might be next and
haunted by the desert's (and their own) secrets, Ahlam and Laura follow Dylan to New York to pursue their dreams--
Ahlam to become a dancer, Laura to make music--but, drunk on the city's intensity and Dylan's drug-fueled lifestyle,
their lives quickly begin to spin out of control. Though its New York portions can sometimes seem unfocused, the
novel provides a lyrical meditation on the confusion and awe of growing up that is made beautifully strange by the
desert's haunting presence. Ahlam's feelings of isolation and inability to fit in--particularly when she's with the
magnetic, confident, but flawed Laura--are also rendered in a way that's both typical and painfully, relatably fresh. But
Assadi shines most in developing the intense, almost destructive bond between the two girls that forms the emotional
nucleus of the book. Muses Ahlam, "I...felt her in the way that I moved, how over the years I came to light my
cigarettes just like her, between ring and middle fingers, how I laughed or how my cash was always stuffed and
disorganized in my wallet, just like hers...I had brought her into my skin. I dreamed sometimes that in the mirror was
her face reflected back at me. Still, I don't know where she ended and I began." Lyrical, raw, and moving.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Assadi, Hannah Lillith: SONORA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477242357&it=r&asid=f1c4c5e4417aeb0d991c7167321fc45b.
Accessed 14 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477242357

---

9/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1505438405463 2/3
Sonora
Michael Cart
Booklist.
113.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2017): p37.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
Sonora. By Hannah Lillith Assadi. Mar. 2017. 208p. Soho, paper, $16 (9781616957926). The daughter of a
Palestinian-refugee father and an Israeli mother, Ahlam grows up in the desert near Phoenix, her childhood consumed
by her desire to meet the enticing Laura and by the fever dreams that consume her sleep. Ahlam finally meets the
fascinating, dangerous Laura as a freshman in high school, and the two bond, being called, variously, goths, gross
lesbians, witches, or ugly freaks. Their lives seem to be cursed, pervaded by death until, at 18, they move to New York,
where Ahlam hopes to become a dancer, and Laura, a singer. But dreams are fleeting things, and hope is soon replaced
by a haze of drugs and alcohol as their lives spiral out of control. Assadi's first novel is--like Ahlam's dreams--fevered,
fragmented, and impressionistic. Its language is lushly poetic--leaves make "a shivery melody"--but occasionally
strained: a man's presence is "gorgeous as if being crushed in lush velvet while cascading off the edge of a cliff."
Though the novel takes itself very seriously, it will interest those looking for a stylish read.--Michael Cart
YA: Older teens who enjoy hard-edged fiction will welcome this unusual coming-of-age novel. MC.
Cart, Michael
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cart, Michael. "Sonora." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 37+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479077958&it=r&asid=ab1b68cd4a9e0044fa9170c411c9e730.
Accessed 14 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479077958

---

9/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1505438405463 3/3
Briefly Noted
Andrew Palmer
The New Yorker.
93.9 (Apr. 17, 2017): p72.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast
Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text: 
Briefly Noted
Phenomena, by Annie Jacobsen (Little, Brown). Drawing on declassified material, this richly researched book
examines a bizarre historical episode: the U.S. government's secret investigations of extrasensory perception and
psychokinesis. Starting in the early years of the Cold War, psychics were given clearance to assist various agencies
with operations that included tracking Soviet submarines, locating fugitives, and mapping the interior of the Chinese
Embassy in Rome. In more mind-bending assignments, they were asked to find the Ark of the Covenant and go back in
time to discover who shot J.F.K. There were uncanny successes, such as the prediction of a Pentagon official's
kidnapping, and information obtained occasionally prompted government action. Jacobsen shows that, in the face of
inexplicable events, even "the most pragmatic, commonsense thinkers found themselves uncertain."
This Long Pursuit, by Richard Holmes (Pantheon). In a genial and energetic reflection on the biographer's craft, one of
its most eminent practitioners notes, "Biographies are understood to write themselves, self-generated (like methane
clouds) by their dead subjects." Giving the lie to this notion, he details his working methods and assesses the role of
biographies in the evolving reputations of their subjects. Holmes swears by what he calls the "Footsteps principle,"
which entails going everywhere that "the subject had ever lived or worked, or travelled or dreamed." Brief portraits of
underappreciated women of letters-Margaret Cavendish, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Somerville-show Holmes's
affinity for figures who, like him, are driven by empathy, enthusiasm, and wonder.
Sonora, by Hannah Lillith Assadi (Soho). In this cryptic debut, two Arizona teen-agers are united by a shared sense of
doom: one, the daughter of Israeli and Palestinian immigrants, has visions of the dead; the other is told by a psychic
that she is a "witch," like her long-dead Native American mother. Believing themselves to be cursed, the girls flee to
New York, where their lives unravel. Though the story struggles under the weight of its many symbols-ghostly
coyotes, crucifix-like cacti, 9/11, alien spaceships, the Sea of Galilee-it powerfully evokes the sense of being an
outsider. "I was at home in the places that could never be," one of the young women realizes. "The places found only in
dreams."
Falling Ill, by C. K. Williams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This posthumous collection of poems, written as the author
was dying, of multiple myeloma, is a gentle but unflinching confrontation with mortality. Beginning with the moment
of diagnosis ("interesting no?"), and signing off with "I want to wish you goodbye but don't dare," Williams records the
progress of his disease and his halting acceptance of the end of life. A steady lilt, alternately peaceful and
hallucinatory, presides over the work, which is devoid of punctuation except for frequent question marks. Uniform in
construction, with five three-line stanzas, the poems feel less like a series than like a single valedictory utterance.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Palmer, Andrew. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 72. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490953791&it=r&asid=64b87f60cc0bd3b632045d4a9365e8fc.
Accessed 14 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490953791

"Assadi, Hannah Lillith: SONORA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477242357&it=r. Accessed 14 Sept. 2017. Cart, Michael. "Sonora." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 37+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479077958&it=r. Accessed 14 Sept. 2017. Palmer, Andrew. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 72. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490953791&it=r. Accessed 14 Sept. 2017.

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  ARTS & CULTURE 04/04/2017 09:23 am ET
  A Devastating Story Of Friendship And Heartbreak That Definitely Passes The Bechdel Test
  Hannah Lillith Assadi’s debut novel is a poetic story about friendship, loss and the fractured ways we assemble an identity.
  By Maddie Crum

  SOHO PRESS
  “There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us,” Hannah Lillith Assadi writes in her debut novel, Sonora. “Between the two, we are crushed.”

  The story, fittingly, moves in waves between past and present. While visiting her father in the hospital ― he’s being treated for pain induced by sciatica ― the narrator, Ahlam, reflects on the beginnings of her friendship with her best friend, Laura.

  The two met when Ahlam, who went by Ariel when she was with everyone but her family, was a young girl living in the Arizona desert. Her father was a Palestinian taxi driver, her mother an Israeli woman who kept two jobs, at Denny’s and a dentist’s office.

  Assadi writes poetically about the Southwest ― the spacious, moneyed homes, the high school football stadium that looms over her hometown. “I remember the signs for new housing developments, one after the other, advertising larger and larger pools, and three instead of two-car garages,” she writes.

  But the fast-developing landscape is also thick with an air of threatening mystery; coyotes lurk in the distance, rain comes on suddenly, and flickering lights can be seen from mountaintops. Ahlam’s father calls his taxi his Battlestar Galactica, thinking of himself as a cosmonaut, uprooted and left to drift far from the place he loves.

  Ahlam is similarly adrift when she meets Laura, a girl she’s noticed walking in front of her to school, and who she continues to follow through their teenage and young adult years, to parties and eventually to New York City, where they move in with an entrepreneurial spirit, Dylan, and focus on dancing and singing.

  Before that, though, Ahlam relates her startling sexual awakening, a pair of encounters laced with tenderness and violence, eventually contributing to her relative abstinence for years to come.

  Ahlam and Laura take their superstitious sensibilities with them to New York, where they talk of bad luck and curses, and seek out spacious places ― the abandoned buildings of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the high knolls of the Greenwood Cemetery ― between half-hearted attempts to pursue their respective passions.

  Together they slide into a habit of drinking all day, and Laura gets addicted to blow. Her relationship with Dylan swerves into emotionally abusive territory, and the scintillating language Assadi used to describe the mysteries of the desert dips into the quick-and-dirty syntax of drug memoirs. Like such memoirists, Assadi sometimes relies too heavily on the book’s seductive subject matter in the story’s second half, quickly relating scenes from parties and fights and drug trips, as though the meaning and feeling behind these experiences were self-evident.

  Still, when she returns to the desert, her story about a heartbreaking friendship once again becomes sorrowful and singular, a mesmerizing take on tripping blindly into adulthood.

  The bottom line:

  A poetic story about friendship, loss and the fractured ways in which we assemble an identity, and a home.

  Subscribe to the Culture Shift email
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  SUBSCRIBE
  Who wrote it:

  This is Hannah Lillith Assadi’s debut novel. She lives in Brooklyn, and has her MFA in fiction from Columbia University.

  Who will read it:

  Anyone interested in coming-of-age stories, or stories set in the American Southwest.

  What other reviews think:

  Publisher’s Weekly: “The structure, moving back and forth in time and space, adds a sense of the magical to a sometimes tragic but always beautiful coming-of-age story.”

  Kirkus: “Lyrical, raw, and moving.”

  Opening lines:

  “I have always missed watching the sun fall down into the desert. It is always so slow. There are no windows in the waiting room. The florescence blares on despite the romance of the hour.”

  Notable passage:

  “By morning, everything way grey swept, the prickly brush swathed in rain. Inhaling the fumes of the storm, the greened soil, the sage, I knew beauty for me would only ever be derived from loss. I saw Sonora before me, so otherworldly, so desolate, some cast-out mistress on the pale blue planet, and longed suddenly to stay.”

  Sonora
  By Hannah Lillith Assadi
  Soho Press, $16.00
  March 28, 2017

  The Bottom Line is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.

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• New York Journal of Books
  http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/sonora
  Word count: 4982

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  Sonora

  Image of Sonora
  Author(s):
  Hannah Lillith Assadi
  Release Date:
  March 27, 2017
  Publisher/Imprint:
  Soho Press
  Pages:
  208
  Buy on Amazon

  Reviewed by:
  David Cooper
  When Pete Townsend coined the phrase “teenage wasteland” to describe suburban adolescent life he was probably not referring to such wastelands in an actual geographic desert, but that is what the suburbs of Phoenix are for high school students Ahlam (aka Ariel) and Laura and what they flee in Hannah Lillith Assadi’s coming of age debut novel Sonora.

  Ahlam, our first person narrator who describes fever dreams, desert landscapes, and urban cityscapes in lyrical prose, is the daughter of immigrant parents who met in New York: Rachel, an Israeli waitress, and Yusef, a Palestinian cab driver with a short temper triggered by Middle East news stories. Ahlam does not take sides in her parents’ spats or their nationalities’ conflicts.

  “The Deir Yassin massacre took place a few days before my father’s birth. It was anomalous in its violence. Villagers, women, children, were all shot. Town after town from Jerusalem to the northern borders emptied as people left on foot with only their most important belongings, thinking they’d be back soon. Some were lucky enough to board buses, the way only a few years earlier, my mother’s grandparents boarded trains in the green woods across Eastern Europe toward a worse fate.”

  Ahlam seems emotionally closer to Judaism and its liturgy than to Islam. In the second half of the book when she lives in Brooklyn she senses some connection when she sees observant Jews, but there is no mention of her interacting with the borough’s Arab-Americans in Boerum Hill or in Bay Ridge.

  An aspiring dancer, Ahlam befriends Laura, a musician, whose Mexican-American mother is deceased and whose frequently absent Irish-American father develops vacation properties on Mexico’s Gulf of California. Together the two friends experiment with drugs, alcohol, and sex beginning in high school in Arizona in the opening two fifths of the novel where they first meet an older young man, Dylan, a visual artist visiting from Brooklyn, and continuing more intensely afterward in New York where they hope to pursue their artistic vocations.

  The narrative requires several suspensions of disbelief, such as that the young women’s parents would consent to their flying to New York with only three hundred dollars and no return ticket, and that when they get there Dylan agrees to provide them with long term housing rent-free.

  Readers may also wonder why they don’t audition for conservatories or college performing arts programs rather than move to a big city with no specific plan and no credential other than a high school diploma. The answer is at least in part Dylan: “He was addictive. He was insolent. He was searing. Laura was right. Dylan was New York.”

  In New York it turns out that Laura is a better musician than Ahlam is a dancer. On the other hand, Ahlam, who goes by Ariel in New York, can actually hold and keep a job, first as a waitress then as a secretary. As they get drawn into Dylan’s drug fueled party scene Laura is more adventurous and with no job to go to the next day lacks even Ahlam’s minimal sense of limits.

  “Laura sat on the ledge of the window, watching the train snake past, smoking. . . . The hour she began drinking crept steadily up until it was standard to see her with a tallboy of cheap beer in place of breakfast. By nightfall, there was nothing for her to do but call a dealer to keep her steady, awake, alert. ‘Let’s call in the troops,’ Laura said.”

  When Laura relates having had simultaneous oral and anal sex with producers to get a record deal Ahlam asks her if she used protection.

  Ahlam, despite her fever dreams and hallucinations, is the more grounded and emotionally stable of the two, perhaps as a matter of temperament and/or brain chemistry, and perhaps because she grew up with two involved parents rather than one often absent one.

  Nonetheless they remain close and the novel is a story of a friendship. Ahlam recalls,

  “Sometimes at work I heard my voice change, I heard Laura in the way I talked, a certain phrase, a certain grammatical error, her favorite conjunction that never existed, and-or-else, and-or-else we’ll just live by the sea, felt her in the way that I moved, how over the years I came to light my cigarettes just like her, between ring and middle fingers, how I laughed or how my cash was always stuffed and disorganized in my wallet, just like hers was. I had brought her into my skin. I dreamed sometimes that in the mirror was her face reflected back at me. Still, I don’t know where she ended and I began.”

  Some readers will prefer the Arizona beginning of the novel for its landscapes and Ahlam’s and her parents’ family dynamics, while others will prefer the descriptions of Ahlam and Laura’s lives in New York and the dramatic tension of whether Laura’s spiral downward can be stopped—and if not, will she pull Ahlam with her? But even in the New York half of the novel Arizona and the theme of home reappear as Ahlam returns periodically to visit her father in the hospital.

  Throughout the book one can’t help admiring Assadi’s handsome prose, such as this excerpt from a page long paragraph:

  “Sometimes I cannot locate any one night as if my life in New York were but a flood of nights. An eternal room of empty wine bottles, ashtrays overflowing, the maze of screeching trains, Laura at the window, Dylan and his parties, filled with fur and cocaine and moderate celebrity, and the cab rides home, the drunken swipes of credit cards with fifteen-dollar balances behind drivers whose faces I never remembered come morning, dinners with Laura alone, Thai food, not finishing our plates, ordering more to drink, someone at the piano, someone holding the guitar, strumming chords, singing songs, concerts in the beginning, neon flashing, rich acquaintances in Soho lofts, next stop Williamsburgh, living in the dark, living in the night, making it through the day only to afford the night.”

  A note on the audiobook version: narrator Soneela Nankani mispronounces the Hebrew word “tefillin” but correctly pronounces all six words of the sh’ma prayer. Apart from that she does a pretty good job. Listeners who purchase the audiobook should take advantage of the offer to also purchase the ebook at a discount; like poetry Assadi’s lyrical prose should be read with both eyes and ears.

  David Cooper is the author of two poetry ebooks, Glued to the Sky and JFK: Lines of Fire, the translator of Little Promises by Rachel Eshed, a journalist at examiner.com, and an experienced reviewer of erotica.

  Buy on Amazon

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  Sonora

  Image of Sonora
  Author(s):
  Hannah Lillith Assadi
  Release Date:
  March 27, 2017
  Publisher/Imprint:
  Soho Press
  Pages:
  208
  Buy on Amazon

  Reviewed by:
  David Cooper
  When Pete Townsend coined the phrase “teenage wasteland” to describe suburban adolescent life he was probably not referring to such wastelands in an actual geographic desert, but that is what the suburbs of Phoenix are for high school students Ahlam (aka Ariel) and Laura and what they flee in Hannah Lillith Assadi’s coming of age debut novel Sonora.

  Ahlam, our first person narrator who describes fever dreams, desert landscapes, and urban cityscapes in lyrical prose, is the daughter of immigrant parents who met in New York: Rachel, an Israeli waitress, and Yusef, a Palestinian cab driver with a short temper triggered by Middle East news stories. Ahlam does not take sides in her parents’ spats or their nationalities’ conflicts.

  “The Deir Yassin massacre took place a few days before my father’s birth. It was anomalous in its violence. Villagers, women, children, were all shot. Town after town from Jerusalem to the northern borders emptied as people left on foot with only their most important belongings, thinking they’d be back soon. Some were lucky enough to board buses, the way only a few years earlier, my mother’s grandparents boarded trains in the green woods across Eastern Europe toward a worse fate.”

  Ahlam seems emotionally closer to Judaism and its liturgy than to Islam. In the second half of the book when she lives in Brooklyn she senses some connection when she sees observant Jews, but there is no mention of her interacting with the borough’s Arab-Americans in Boerum Hill or in Bay Ridge.

  An aspiring dancer, Ahlam befriends Laura, a musician, whose Mexican-American mother is deceased and whose frequently absent Irish-American father develops vacation properties on Mexico’s Gulf of California. Together the two friends experiment with drugs, alcohol, and sex beginning in high school in Arizona in the opening two fifths of the novel where they first meet an older young man, Dylan, a visual artist visiting from Brooklyn, and continuing more intensely afterward in New York where they hope to pursue their artistic vocations.

  The narrative requires several suspensions of disbelief, such as that the young women’s parents would consent to their flying to New York with only three hundred dollars and no return ticket, and that when they get there Dylan agrees to provide them with long term housing rent-free.

  Readers may also wonder why they don’t audition for conservatories or college performing arts programs rather than move to a big city with no specific plan and no credential other than a high school diploma. The answer is at least in part Dylan: “He was addictive. He was insolent. He was searing. Laura was right. Dylan was New York.”

  In New York it turns out that Laura is a better musician than Ahlam is a dancer. On the other hand, Ahlam, who goes by Ariel in New York, can actually hold and keep a job, first as a waitress then as a secretary. As they get drawn into Dylan’s drug fueled party scene Laura is more adventurous and with no job to go to the next day lacks even Ahlam’s minimal sense of limits.

  “Laura sat on the ledge of the window, watching the train snake past, smoking. . . . The hour she began drinking crept steadily up until it was standard to see her with a tallboy of cheap beer in place of breakfast. By nightfall, there was nothing for her to do but call a dealer to keep her steady, awake, alert. ‘Let’s call in the troops,’ Laura said.”

  When Laura relates having had simultaneous oral and anal sex with producers to get a record deal Ahlam asks her if she used protection.

  Ahlam, despite her fever dreams and hallucinations, is the more grounded and emotionally stable of the two, perhaps as a matter of temperament and/or brain chemistry, and perhaps because she grew up with two involved parents rather than one often absent one.

  Nonetheless they remain close and the novel is a story of a friendship. Ahlam recalls,

  “Sometimes at work I heard my voice change, I heard Laura in the way I talked, a certain phrase, a certain grammatical error, her favorite conjunction that never existed, and-or-else, and-or-else we’ll just live by the sea, felt her in the way that I moved, how over the years I came to light my cigarettes just like her, between ring and middle fingers, how I laughed or how my cash was always stuffed and disorganized in my wallet, just like hers was. I had brought her into my skin. I dreamed sometimes that in the mirror was her face reflected back at me. Still, I don’t know where she ended and I began.”

  Some readers will prefer the Arizona beginning of the novel for its landscapes and Ahlam’s and her parents’ family dynamics, while others will prefer the descriptions of Ahlam and Laura’s lives in New York and the dramatic tension of whether Laura’s spiral downward can be stopped—and if not, will she pull Ahlam with her? But even in the New York half of the novel Arizona and the theme of home reappear as Ahlam returns periodically to visit her father in the hospital.

  Throughout the book one can’t help admiring Assadi’s handsome prose, such as this excerpt from a page long paragraph:

  “Sometimes I cannot locate any one night as if my life in New York were but a flood of nights. An eternal room of empty wine bottles, ashtrays overflowing, the maze of screeching trains, Laura at the window, Dylan and his parties, filled with fur and cocaine and moderate celebrity, and the cab rides home, the drunken swipes of credit cards with fifteen-dollar balances behind drivers whose faces I never remembered come morning, dinners with Laura alone, Thai food, not finishing our plates, ordering more to drink, someone at the piano, someone holding the guitar, strumming chords, singing songs, concerts in the beginning, neon flashing, rich acquaintances in Soho lofts, next stop Williamsburgh, living in the dark, living in the night, making it through the day only to afford the night.”

  A note on the audiobook version: narrator Soneela Nankani mispronounces the Hebrew word “tefillin” but correctly pronounces all six words of the sh’ma prayer. Apart from that she does a pretty good job. Listeners who purchase the audiobook should take advantage of the offer to also purchase the ebook at a discount; like poetry Assadi’s lyrical prose should be read with both eyes and ears.

  David Cooper is the author of two poetry ebooks, Glued to the Sky and JFK: Lines of Fire, the translator of Little Promises by Rachel Eshed, a journalist at examiner.com, and an experienced reviewer of erotica.

  Buy on Amazon

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  ShareThis Copy and Pastenew york journal of books Facebook Twitter Google+ Pinterest LinkedIn Home Recent Reviews Fiction NonFiction About Us Enter your keywords Sonora Author(s): Hannah Lillith Assadi Release Date: March 27, 2017 Publisher/Imprint: Soho Press Pages: 208 Buy on Amazon Reviewed by: David Cooper When Pete Townsend coined the phrase “teenage wasteland” to describe suburban adolescent life he was probably not referring to such wastelands in an actual geographic desert, but that is what the suburbs of Phoenix are for high school students Ahlam (aka Ariel) and Laura and what they flee in Hannah Lillith Assadi’s coming of age debut novel Sonora. Ahlam, our first person narrator who describes fever dreams, desert landscapes, and urban cityscapes in lyrical prose, is the daughter of immigrant parents who met in New York: Rachel, an Israeli waitress, and Yusef, a Palestinian cab driver with a short temper triggered by Middle East news stories. Ahlam does not take sides in her parents’ spats or their nationalities’ conflicts. “The Deir Yassin massacre took place a few days before my father’s birth. It was anomalous in its violence. Villagers, women, children, were all shot. Town after town from Jerusalem to the northern borders emptied as people left on foot with only their most important belongings, thinking they’d be back soon. Some were lucky enough to board buses, the way only a few years earlier, my mother’s grandparents boarded trains in the green woods across Eastern Europe toward a worse fate.” Ahlam seems emotionally closer to Judaism and its liturgy than to Islam. In the second half of the book when she lives in Brooklyn she senses some connection when she sees observant Jews, but there is no mention of her interacting with the borough’s Arab-Americans in Boerum Hill or in Bay Ridge. An aspiring dancer, Ahlam befriends Laura, a musician, whose Mexican-American mother is deceased and whose frequently absent Irish-American father develops vacation properties on Mexico’s Gulf of California. Together the two friends experiment with drugs, alcohol, and sex beginning in high school in Arizona in the opening two fifths of the novel where they first meet an older young man, Dylan, a visual artist visiting from Brooklyn, and continuing more intensely afterward in New York where they hope to pursue their artistic vocations. The narrative requires several suspensions of disbelief, such as that the young women’s parents would consent to their flying to New York with only three hundred dollars and no return ticket, and that when they get there Dylan agrees to provide them with long term housing rent-free. Readers may also wonder why they don’t audition for conservatories or college performing arts programs rather than move to a big city with no specific plan and no credential other than a high school diploma. The answer is at least in part Dylan: “He was addictive. He was insolent. He was searing. Laura was right. Dylan was New York.” In New York it turns out that Laura is a better musician than Ahlam is a dancer. On the other hand, Ahlam, who goes by Ariel in New York, can actually hold and keep a job, first as a waitress then as a secretary. As they get drawn into Dylan’s drug fueled party scene Laura is more adventurous and with no job to go to the next day lacks even Ahlam’s minimal sense of limits. “Laura sat on the ledge of the window, watching the train snake past, smoking. . . . The hour she began drinking crept steadily up until it was standard to see her with a tallboy of cheap beer in place of breakfast. By nightfall, there was nothing for her to do but call a dealer to keep her steady, awake, alert. ‘Let’s call in the troops,’ Laura said.” When Laura relates having had simultaneous oral and anal sex with producers to get a record deal Ahlam asks her if she used protection. Ahlam, despite her fever dreams and hallucinations, is the more grounded and emotionally stable of the two, perhaps as a matter of temperament and/or brain chemistry, and perhaps because she grew up with two involved parents rather than one often absent one. Nonetheless they remain close and the novel is a story of a friendship. Ahlam recalls, “Sometimes at work I heard my voice change, I heard Laura in the way I talked, a certain phrase, a certain grammatical error, her favorite conjunction that never existed, and-or-else, and-or-else we’ll just live by the sea, felt her in the way that I moved, how over the years I came to light my cigarettes just like her, between ring and middle fingers, how I laughed or how my cash was always stuffed and disorganized in my wallet, just like hers was. I had brought her into my skin. I dreamed sometimes that in the mirror was her face reflected back at me. Still, I don’t know where she ended and I began.” Some readers will prefer the Arizona beginning of the novel for its landscapes and Ahlam’s and her parents’ family dynamics, while others will prefer the descriptions of Ahlam and Laura’s lives in New York and the dramatic tension of whether Laura’s spiral downward can be stopped—and if not, will she pull Ahlam with her? But even in the New York half of the novel Arizona and the theme of home reappear as Ahlam returns periodically to visit her father in the hospital. Throughout the book one can’t help admiring Assadi’s handsome prose, such as this excerpt from a page long paragraph: “Sometimes I cannot locate any one night as if my life in New York were but a flood of nights. An eternal room of empty wine bottles, ashtrays overflowing, the maze of screeching trains, Laura at the window, Dylan and his parties, filled with fur and cocaine and moderate celebrity, and the cab rides home, the drunken swipes of credit cards with fifteen-dollar balances behind drivers whose faces I never remembered come morning, dinners with Laura alone, Thai food, not finishing our plates, ordering more to drink, someone at the piano, someone holding the guitar, strumming chords, singing songs, concerts in the beginning, neon flashing, rich acquaintances in Soho lofts, next stop Williamsburgh, living in the dark, living in the night, making it through the day only to afford the night.” A note on the audiobook version: narrator Soneela Nankani mispronounces the Hebrew word “tefillin” but correctly pronounces all six words of the sh’ma prayer. Apart from that she does a pretty good job. Listeners who purchase the audiobook should take advantage of the offer to also purchase the ebook at a discount; like poetry Assadi’s lyrical prose should be read with both eyes and ears. David Cooper is the author of two poetry ebooks, Glued to the Sky and JFK: Lines of Fire, the translator of Little Promises by Rachel Eshed, a journalist at examiner.com, and an experienced reviewer of erotica. Buy on Amazon Home Home Recent Reviews Fiction NonFiction About Us Sitemap Terms of Use Privacy Policy Contact Us NYJB Editing Services Review Requests Facebook Twitter Google+ Pinterest LinkedIn new york journal of books Facebook Twitter Google+ Pinterest LinkedIn Home Recent Reviews Fiction NonFiction About Us Enter your keywords Sonora Author(s): Hannah Lillith Assadi Release Date: March 27, 2017 Publisher/Imprint: Soho Press Pages: 208 Buy on Amazon Reviewed by: David Cooper When Pete Townsend coined the phrase “teenage wasteland” to describe suburban adolescent life he was probably not referring to such wastelands in an actual geographic desert, but that is what the suburbs of Phoenix are for high school students Ahlam (aka Ariel) and Laura and what they flee in Hannah Lillith Assadi’s coming of age debut novel Sonora. Ahlam, our first person narrator who describes fever dreams, desert landscapes, and urban cityscapes in lyrical prose, is the daughter of immigrant parents who met in New York: Rachel, an Israeli waitress, and Yusef, a Palestinian cab driver with a short temper triggered by Middle East news stories. Ahlam does not take sides in her parents’ spats or their nationalities’ conflicts. “The Deir Yassin massacre took place a few days before my father’s birth. It was anomalous in its violence. Villagers, women, children, were all shot. Town after town from Jerusalem to the northern borders emptied as people left on foot with only their most important belongings, thinking they’d be back soon. Some were lucky enough to board buses, the way only a few years earlier, my mother’s grandparents boarded trains in the green woods across Eastern Europe toward a worse fate.” Ahlam seems emotionally closer to Judaism and its liturgy than to Islam. In the second half of the book when she lives in Brooklyn she senses some connection when she sees observant Jews, but there is no mention of her interacting with the borough’s Arab-Americans in Boerum Hill or in Bay Ridge. An aspiring dancer, Ahlam befriends Laura, a musician, whose Mexican-American mother is deceased and whose frequently absent Irish-American father develops vacation properties on Mexico’s Gulf of California. Together the two friends experiment with drugs, alcohol, and sex beginning in high school in Arizona in the opening two fifths of the novel where they first meet an older young man, Dylan, a visual artist visiting from Brooklyn, and continuing more intensely afterward in New York where they hope to pursue their artistic vocations. The narrative requires several suspensions of disbelief, such as that the young women’s parents would consent to their flying to New York with only three hundred dollars and no return ticket, and that when they get there Dylan agrees to provide them with long term housing rent-free. Readers may also wonder why they don’t audition for conservatories or college performing arts programs rather than move to a big city with no specific plan and no credential other than a high school diploma. The answer is at least in part Dylan: “He was addictive. He was insolent. He was searing. Laura was right. Dylan was New York.” In New York it turns out that Laura is a better musician than Ahlam is a dancer. On the other hand, Ahlam, who goes by Ariel in New York, can actually hold and keep a job, first as a waitress then as a secretary. As they get drawn into Dylan’s drug fueled party scene Laura is more adventurous and with no job to go to the next day lacks even Ahlam’s minimal sense of limits. “Laura sat on the ledge of the window, watching the train snake past, smoking. . . . The hour she began drinking crept steadily up until it was standard to see her with a tallboy of cheap beer in place of breakfast. By nightfall, there was nothing for her to do but call a dealer to keep her steady, awake, alert. ‘Let’s call in the troops,’ Laura said.” When Laura relates having had simultaneous oral and anal sex with producers to get a record deal Ahlam asks her if she used protection. Ahlam, despite her fever dreams and hallucinations, is the more grounded and emotionally stable of the two, perhaps as a matter of temperament and/or brain chemistry, and perhaps because she grew up with two involved parents rather than one often absent one. Nonetheless they remain close and the novel is a story of a friendship. Ahlam recalls, “Sometimes at work I heard my voice change, I heard Laura in the way I talked, a certain phrase, a certain grammatical error, her favorite conjunction that never existed, and-or-else, and-or-else we’ll just live by the sea, felt her in the way that I moved, how over the years I came to light my cigarettes just like her, between ring and middle fingers, how I laughed or how my cash was always stuffed and disorganized in my wallet, just like hers was. I had brought her into my skin. I dreamed sometimes that in the mirror was her face reflected back at me. Still, I don’t know where she ended and I began.” Some readers will prefer the Arizona beginning of the novel for its landscapes and Ahlam’s and her parents’ family dynamics, while others will prefer the descriptions of Ahlam and Laura’s lives in New York and the dramatic tension of whether Laura’s spiral downward can be stopped—and if not, will she pull Ahlam with her? But even in the New York half of the novel Arizona and the theme of home reappear as Ahlam returns periodically to visit her father in the hospital. Throughout the book one can’t help admiring Assadi’s handsome prose, such as this excerpt from a page long paragraph: “Sometimes I cannot locate any one night as if my life in New York were but a flood of nights. An eternal room of empty wine bottles, ashtrays overflowing, the maze of screeching trains, Laura at the window, Dylan and his parties, filled with fur and cocaine and moderate celebrity, and the cab rides home, the drunken swipes of credit cards with fifteen-dollar balances behind drivers whose faces I never remembered come morning, dinners with Laura alone, Thai food, not finishing our plates, ordering more to drink, someone at the piano, someone holding the guitar, strumming chords, singing songs, concerts in the beginning, neon flashing, rich acquaintances in Soho lofts, next stop Williamsburgh, living in the dark, living in the night, making it through the day only to afford the night.” A note on the audiobook version: narrator Soneela Nankani mispronounces the Hebrew word “tefillin” but correctly pronounces all six words of the sh’ma prayer. Apart from that she does a pretty good job. Listeners who purchase the audiobook should take advantage of the offer to also purchase the ebook at a discount; like poetry Assadi’s lyrical prose should be read with both eyes and ears. David Cooper is the author of two poetry ebooks, Glued to the Sky and JFK: Lines of Fire, the translator of Little Promises by Rachel Eshed, a journalist at examiner.com, and an experienced reviewer of erotica. Buy on Amazon Home Home Recent Reviews Fiction NonFiction About Us Sitemap Terms of Use Privacy Policy Contact Us NYJB Editing Services Review Requests Facebook Twitter Google+ Pinterest LinkedIn ShareThis Copy and Paste

• Bustle
  https://www.bustle.com/p/sonora-by-hannah-lillith-assadi-is-bustles-american-woman-book-club-pick-this-april-48625
  Word count: 342

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  ® 2017 BUSTLE

  'Sonora' By Hannah Lillith Assadi Is Bustle's American Woman Book Club Pick This April

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  ByEMMA OULTONApr 3 2017

  Every month so far this year, Bustle's American Woman Book Club has come together on Goodreads to read a new book about one of the infinite experiences of living as an American woman. In April, the book club will be reading Sonora by Hannah Lillith Assadi. Here's why you're going to want to join us.

  Sonora is the powerful story of Ahlam, the daughter of a Palestinian refugee and his Israeli wife, growing up against the backdrop of the Sonoran desert outside Phoenix. There, she meets the enchanting misfit Laura — and the two fall into an intense and all-consuming relationship, experimenting with drugs and sex, and confiding in each other about their broken home lives. Meanwhile, strange things are happening: Ahlam has been having prophetic fever dreams, mysterious blue lights are appearing in the sky, and a series of unexplained deaths and suicides are spreading through Ahlam's high school. Afraid that they might be next, Ahlam and Laura escape to New York — where their lives begin to spiral out of control.

  Sonora is a poetic coming-of-age story about friendship, identity, secrets, and obsession that will haunt you long after you turn the final page. So what are you waiting for? Grab your copy, and come read with us!

  Sonora by Hannah Lillith Assadi, $14.40, Strand Book Store

  To read along with Bustle's American Woman Book Club, follow us on Goodreads and join in with the discussion. And stay tuned for more information about our event at Strand Book Store in NYC — where we'll be bringing the conversation offline.

• Janklow and Nesbit
  http://www.janklowandnesbit.com/news/2017/april/sonora-hannah-lillith-assadi
  Word count: 234

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  SONORA by Hannah Lillith Assadi
  Posted on April 17, 2017 in Book Reviews
  SONORA by Hannah Lillith Assadi
  Hannah Lillith Assadi’s SONORA was written up in the New Yorker’s Briefly Noted section, with the editor’s endorsement: “it powerfully evokes the sense of being an outsider.” The book has also been selected as Bustle’s American Woman Book Club pick for April, which called it “a poetic coming-of-age story about friendship, identity, secrets, and obsession that will haunt you long after you turn the final page.” Soho Press published the book March 28, 2017.

  For more information, please visit the following link:
  https://www.bustle.com/p/sonora-by-hannah-lillith-assadi-is-bustles-amer…
  For more information, please visit the following link:
  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/phenomena-this-long-pursuit…

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• The Fanzine
  http://thefanzine.com/swimming-in-starlight-a-review-of-hannah-lillith-assadis-sonora/
  Word count: 1124

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  SWIMMING IN STARLIGHT: A REVIEW OF HANNAH LILLITH ASSADI’S SONORAKIMBERLY KING PARSONS25.04.17
  sonoraSonora
  by Hannah Lillith Assadi
  Soho Press
  248 pp / $16

  “A taste for the desert is a taste for ultimates, and death is the backdrop against which all we know comes to brilliance. When a dead cactus remains on its feet, stripped to its rented skeleton, it leaves a shape as refined as a sculpture…A dead cholla tells us nothing of what’s ahead for us, any more than the death of a close friend: all it reveals is process…But it brings to consciousness our complicity in a mystery that becomes, even as we reject it, our own.”

  – Bruce Berger, The Telling Distance: Conversations with the American Desert

  Deserts seem to be the least mysterious of all landscapes—what could possibly be hiding in that vast, sandy analog?—but wander into one and you’ll find its secrets. Animals hide in plain sight: triggered by footfall, dusty lizards run across your path, stone-still birds erupt into sudden flight. Light and sound travel differently in the arid heat, and the senses are altered. You might hear a low, unbroken hum or get the feeling you’re being watched. There’s a new awareness of the self—the extreme environment is an invitation to examine the edges of the body, the mind. Maybe this is why the desert is notoriously appealing to loners and misfits, seekers of all kinds. You are the creature you’ll find hiding out there.

  The Arizona desert is the haunting center of Sonora, Hannah Lillith Assadi’s mesmerizing debut novel. As crucial as any character, this setting is a surreal canvas upon which Assadi projects the intensity of youth. Plagued since childhood by visions and fever dreams, narrator Ahlam is never far from the ethereal thrum of the desert, a “land wrought for ghosts…thronged by spirits, the wind in the brush a moan, a song.” With a backward-looking structure that moves effortlessly through space and time, Sonora is a gritty incantation, a coming-of-age story steeped in dark magic.

  Born to a Palestinian father and an Israeli mother, Ahlam stands apart from the students at her well-to-do suburban high school. Her family lives in an apartment permeated by the smell of “smoke, Turkish coffee and cat shit.” Her mother works two jobs and suffers frequent migraines. To strangers, Ahlam’s taxi-driving father explains away his accent by saying he’s from “the Holy Land.” He assumes the name Joseph and sometimes refers to Ahlam as Ariel. “You will understand when you are older,” he tells her. “Ariel is pretty. You can use it when you want. Don’t ever become attached to your name, Ahlam, or to the place you are from.” Though her father believes this constructed identity will keep Ahlam safe and help her blend in, it only serves to intensify her isolation.

  Ahlam occupies her time with ballet classes and late night taxi rides with her father. It isn’t until she befriends Laura, another artistic outsider, that she finds some relief from her loneliness. The teens quickly become infatuated with one another, escaping into a shared world of recklessness and experimentation. In graceful, breathless prose, Assadi reveals the girls’ artistic longings. Laura sings “music composed in the language of stars” and Ahlam spins and spins, using the “repetition as a means to block out the wreckage.” All the while the landscape murmurs in the background. Mysterious lights hover in the night sky, and several students from the high school die or disappear into the desert under mysterious circumstances.

  Then Dylan, an older artist from New York City, befriends the girls, and they quickly become a trio. With a pocket watch and cigarette burns on his arms, “the jumble of centuries in his attire,” Ahlam suddenly feels older too, “as if by being in proximity to Dylan [she knows] things about freedom and death.” Dylan opens the girls’ minds but also changes the dynamic of their relationship, especially once he and Laura get romantically involved.

  Ahlam’s parents finally save up enough money to buy a house, but that doesn’t erase the sense of displacement the family feels in their neighborhood. Her parents frequently fight, and tension mounts at home. When Dylan suddenly goes back to New York, Laura and Ahlam find themselves adrift. They are increasingly threatened by the destructive charms of the desert: Ahlam’s visions become more disturbing and Laura grows restless. Ahlam has started to lose herself in Laura, her own identity obscured by her friend’s wild confidence. Ultimately, they follow Dylan to the city, where they hope to escape the desert curse and pursue their arts.

  They retreat to Dylan’s loft apartment on the Gowanus Canal, but Brooklyn is a confused blur of excess and bad decisions. Soon, the girls set aside their creative pursuits. The “years smash together…an eternal room full of empty wine bottles, ashtrays overflowing, the maze of screeching trains, Laura at the window, Dylan and his parties, filled with fur and cocaine and moderate celebrity…” There’s a numbness and overall lack of grounding to the New York sections of the novel, and this is precisely the point. Assadi works a kind of strange alchemy in that Dylan’s neighborhood, despite its crowded rooftops and wild parties, is rendered as cosmically empty. Ahlam and Laura remain entangled, but when Laura’s orbit begins spinning dangerously out of control, Ahlam can only stand by helplessly, as though watching from afar. Ahlam’s New York City is vacant and eerie, saturated in memories of creosote and wailing coyotes. No matter where she goes or how much she wishes otherwise, she can’t escape the pull of the desert.

  Like coming across an animal skull in the sand, gleaming and picked clean, Sonora is as striking as it is unforgettable. “We are all waiting for a form of transport, a ship, a saucer, to carry us out of the too-dark night,” says Ahlam, sifting through her scarred past. First friend, first love, first loss: these are classic defining moments in any young person’s life, but in Assadi’s captivating hands, the familiar is made strange, extraordinary.

  Tags: Hannah Lilith Assadi, Sonoa

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  « Book Review 2017-011: August Snow by Stephen Mack Jones | Main | Short Story Collections: 2017-2019 an update »

  August 01, 2017

  Book Review 2017-012: Sonora by Hannah Lillith Assadi

  Assadi - SonoraBook Review 2017-012

  Sonora by Hannah Lillith Assadi

  2017 by Soho Press, 191 pages

  (I received a copy of the ARC of this from the publisher)

  In her debut, Hannah Lillith Assadi has given us an almost anti-coming-of-age novel in that her young characters seem to have been of age from the get go. Not that the main duo, the narrator Ahlam (known as Ariel through much of the work), nor her friend from high school forward, Laura, don’t come of age—more that even while doing so they don’t really seem to be moving beyond any sort of innocence.

  Ahlam’s father is Palestinian and her mother Israeli, leading to conflict within the home on a regular basis. They live outside of Phoenix, allowing them frequent access to the desert. She meets Laura their freshmen year of high school and bond the way that maybe only outsiders can—that bond where neither will ever let go because they believe there may be no other person to bond with. They also bond over the fact that Ahlam sees things, has visions of the dead, while Laura has been told that, like her Mexican-American mother (who is not around), she’s a witch. In the case of Laura and Ahlam, their bonds remain tight through early experiments with drinking, drugs, and sex. They spend time in the desert and have classmates die mysteriously over the years.

  Their bond continues on after the girls move to New York together after high school. There they meet back up with Dylan, an older guy they’d met in the desert a year earlier. He allows them to live with him while they take their own shots in the arts (Laura via music and Ahlam through dance). Neither is quite up to making it level, though only Ahlam really seems to realize this and take on jobs like waitressing and as a secretary. The lifestyle with Dylan takes the party experiments to a much higher level.

  Assadi captures the bond and friendship of these two young women very well. At times the characters blend into one another and this is intentional, not a lack of control in the writing—it’s Assadi showing just how close the girls have become over the years. Through the NY second half of the novel, Ahlam and Laura remain outsiders even though they live with Dylan, live where the partys are held. Their thoughts and actions are always just on the periphery of main conversations and the actions at the home. Neither one “makes it” in their field.

  Assadi hits on what it’s like to be in a friendship like that when you’re the, even if only slightly, more grounded friend. There’s a serious question throughout whether or not Laura is going to party herself to death or not, and while she’s headed in that direction, is Ahlam going to fall with her, or be able to steady her? And all the while, Ahlam is occasionally heading back to Arizona to visit her father who has health issues of his own.

  None of this is a world I’m overly familiar with—there would have been a much longer, louder discussion had I suggested to my parents that I head to NYC after high school with a buddy of mine. I also don’t know the odds on finding free living arrangements—even as an attractive young woman, that last for a couple of years of spiraling downward. But Assadi has made them believable with her writing and development of the two characters. I’d also be surprised to find that Assadi didn’t have some poetry in her background, or maybe even music—the writing is lyrical at times, lovely combinations of words that sing and it might takes half a paragraph to actually grasp the drudgery one or both of the girls were going through. It’s really quite lovely what Assadi does there and the book is a very quick read—between the writing, and the story, there wasn’t a lot of setting the book down. It’s a great debut by an author I look forward to reading more of in the future.

  August 01, 2017 in Book Reviews | Permalink
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