Description: In this haunting, sensual story of a young girl growing up in Iraq, the young narrator (we never learn her name) is torn between the cultures of her parents: she is the product of a beautiful English mother, who is frustrated with the family's provincial life in the Iraqi countryside, and an Iraqi father, a talented chemist and marketing man working for a flavorings factory. Though the narrator loves to escape to the river and join in the songs and barefoot games of the illiterate local children, at her mother's insistence she attends a western-style school of music and ballet, and as a teenager she becomes a talented ballerina. During the Iran/Iraq war, the family moves to Baghdad, where she throws herself with passionate abandon into her training on pointe. As her mother drifts deeper into an affair with an Englishman, the narrator becomes wise to the difficulties in her parents' marriage and develops a new, adult relationship with her father, who has begun to teach her the magic of the colorful powders and test tubes in his study just before he dies.

Khedairi conveys all the surreality of life during wartime, especially for a teenager, whose development moves through the full range of adolescent discovery and complexity even as the city around her is virtually shut clown by blackouts, food shortages, and the loss of a generation of young men. The death of her father, her first love affair, and a diagnosis of breast cancer for her mother catapult the narrator into adulthood, and she has become a clear-eyed, cosmopolitan young woman by the time she brings her mother to London for medical treatment.

This is a rare look at iraqi life from the inside out, in which we see a young womancome to terms with both East and West in a way that few Americans ever do, she stands alone at the finish, viewing her home country from a great distance, and herself as an adult who has learned to choose her own way.

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