This startlingly inventive novel following an American woman's first trip to the Middle East, Deena Helm's Our Cut of Salt is an unforgettable revenge drama with a supernatural twist. It is part of an emerging genre of fiction by writers reckoning with the history of their grandparents' lost Palestinian homelands by crafting intimate narratives of families and dreams ravaged by the mass displacement that occurred in 1948, now known as the Nakba (the Arabic word for catastrophe).
In the summer of 2002, Marina is a recent college graduate preparing to depart Chicago to her late grandmother Nuhad's ancestral home in present-day Israel. Once there, Marina hopes to find the "small stone house" where generations of her grandmother's family grew up breathing the salt air and which Nuhad was forced to flee during an attack by Israeli soldiers.
Helm elegantly juxtaposes Nuhad's girlhood seaside adventures with the more recent narrative of Marina's arrival in Haifa, while the wounded spirit of Nuhad's stone house maintains a haunting, restless presence throughout the story. Marina realizes just how much family history Nuhad concealed from her descendants, and becomes determined to uncover not only the missing pieces of her grandmother's life but also the mass graves of Nakba victims under a parking lot in Haifa. Marina's is an audacious plan to reclaim the past, to tame the tormented spirit of the house stolen in 1948. It's high time, she decides, to steal it back.
As a debut effort, Our Cut of Salt is a significant achievement, deploying fabulism to dark, impressive effect to convey historical horrors that, as Helm asserts, are still repeating. --Shahina Piyarali