Journalist Yasmin Zaher's debut novel, The Coin, follows a young, meticulous Palestinian woman as she spirals out of control while trying to establish herself in New York City. After getting a job teaching English at a private all-boys middle school, the unnamed narrator embraces unorthodox teaching methods that encourage the boys to behave more like her followers than her students. Meanwhile, at home, she follows an expensive and unyielding cleaning and self-care routine, funded by her late parents' allowance. Yet her raw scrubbings and endless moisturizing masks aren't enough to quell her obsessions; soon she's teamed up with a homeless man to resell Birkin bags to fashionista wannabes. But even this center cannot hold as the narrator is pulled ever more toward extremities.
A hypnotic character study as obsessive as its narrator, The Coin luxuriates in its narrator's relentless internal monologue. While her eccentricities are clear from the start--telling her students "To love is to be taken hostage, boys, it's Stockholm syndrome" qualifies as what one might call a red flag--her compulsions are convincing enough to take readers hostage, too. Zaher consistently pinpoints those little textures and smells and impulses that can itch under a person's skin like a splinter and leverages them to build a world of seemingly indefensible cravings, unquenchable urges, and frantic pursuits. The coin of the title may seem to be a skin imperfection the narrator identifies about herself early in the novel, but there's no mistaking the book's larger fixation with the allusive presence of money: its paradoxical embodiment in a designer bag, its intangibility, and its all-encompassing reach. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor