BOOKPATHS

United States -- Midwest

Listen to Morning Edition’s interview with Mojha Khaf, author of The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, on the NPR website. The novel tells the story of “a Syrian girl transplanted to the American Midwest in the 1970s."

"After we got out of the store, we looked at each other and we said, 'Do you suppose people look at us like the way we just looked at the Amish?' And we looked at each other and said, 'Yeah, I guess that's how people look at Muslims, especially [because] we were both women who both wore hijab (the Islamic headscarf), and that was sort of a revelation.’" – from NPR interview with Mojha Khaf

Bookpath: Midwestern United States

Now in November, by Josephine Johnson (New York, NY : The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1991 reprint edition)

Josephine Johnson’s 1935 Pulitzer Prize winning novel tells the story of a family’s “struggle to keep their land and hold their family together” during the Depression and drought of the 1930s. Beautifully written, readers move into the Midwestern landscape through the voice of Margaret, one of the Haldmarnes’s daughters, as she describes her family’s love of the land, determination to overcome economic and natural disasters, and ultimate tragedy.

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“Now in November I can see our years as a whole. This autumn is like both an end and a beginning to our lives, and those days which seemed confused with the blur of all things too near and too familiar are clear and strange now. It has been a long year, longer and more full of meaning than all those ten years that went before it. There were nights when I felt that we were moving toward some awful and hopeless hour, but when that hour came it was broken up and confused because we were too near, and I did not even quite realize that it had come.” – from Now in November, by Josephine Johnson