Liyana Abboud, a fourteen year old girl from St. Louis, is told by her father that they are moving to Jerusalem, her father’s homeland. Doctor Abboud never meant to stay in America after medical school, but fell in love with her mother Susan and stayed. Liyana isn’t enthused at all about the move, not after her first kiss from a schoolmate named Jackson. She can’t envision moving away just before high school and from her best friend Claire. Not knowing the language, meeting relatives she never knew before, and living in a society that is different from her own are challenges she must face. Liyana struggles with the fact that her parents expect her to accept a new way of life without asking her opinion. Liyana’s brother Rafik on the other hand is happy for a new change in scenery.

After arriving in Jerusalem, her family meets her father’s family for the first time. Her grandmother or Sitti is a colorful character who believes in tea leaf readings and mystical ways in curing people. She tells wonderful stories and shares her belief in angels with her family. When she met Sitti, tears rolled down her rugged cheeks and she threw back her head and trilled her traditional cry. Her female relatives wore “long dresses made of thick fabric, purple, gold, and navy blue, and stitched brightly with fabulous, complicated embroidery.” All of them wore gold bangles on their wrists. Her male relatives wore suits to their first meeting.

Liyana soon finds herself enrolled in an Armenian school and learning her family’s Arabic language with kindergartners. With an unusually long lunch break, Liyana meets a Jewish boy named Omer. They begin a forbidden friendship that blooms into love. The Abboud family moved to Jerusalem with hopes that things were better, but they soon realize peace among neighbors is hard to come by.

The author presents the story in an authentic way by showing the Abboud’s struggle to acclimate into an unfamiliar society. Even Dr. Abboud has come back to a new Jerusalem different from his childhood. The underlying tension between the Palestinians and Israelis is ever present with the destruction of Sitti’s bathroom, the shooting of Khaled, Liyana’s friend, and the arrest of doctor Abboud himself. Nye gives her readers an accurate backdrop of Jerusalem. Olive trees that lined the roads and the streets of Jerusalem with its ancient stone walls older than the daily pedestrians who walk on them. She not only mentions the dominant groups who inhabit the city, but other cultures that live among them such as the Armenians and Bedouins. She gives her readers the prospective of the old and young of the country and their feelings about the fighting. The hope and peace among her characters show readers what many in that region of the world yearn for. A compelling and well written book rarely discussed extensively in classrooms throughout the United States.