Book Review 2017-012
Sonora by Hannah Lillith Assadi
2017 by Soho Press, 191 pages
(I received a copy of the ARC of this from the publisher)
In her debut, Hannah Lillith Assadi has given us an almost anti-coming-of-age novel in that her young characters seem to have been of age from the get go. Not that the main duo, the narrator Ahlam (known as Ariel through much of the work), nor her friend from high school forward, Laura, don’t come of age—more that even while doing so they don’t really seem to be moving beyond any sort of innocence.
Ahlam’s father is Palestinian and her mother Israeli, leading to conflict within the home on a regular basis. They live outside of Phoenix, allowing them frequent access to the desert. She meets Laura their freshmen year of high school and bond the way that maybe only outsiders can—that bond where neither will ever let go because they believe there may be no other person to bond with. They also bond over the fact that Ahlam sees things, has visions of the dead, while Laura has been told that, like her Mexican-American mother (who is not around), she’s a witch. In the case of Laura and Ahlam, their bonds remain tight through early experiments with drinking, drugs, and sex. They spend time in the desert and have classmates die mysteriously over the years.
Their bond continues on after the girls move to New York together after high school. There they meet back up with Dylan, an older guy they’d met in the desert a year earlier. He allows them to live with him while they take their own shots in the arts (Laura via music and Ahlam through dance). Neither is quite up to making it level, though only Ahlam really seems to realize this and take on jobs like waitressing and as a secretary. The lifestyle with Dylan takes the party experiments to a much higher level.
Assadi captures the bond and friendship of these two young women very well. At times the characters blend into one another and this is intentional, not a lack of control in the writing—it’s Assadi showing just how close the girls have become over the years. Through the NY second half of the novel, Ahlam and Laura remain outsiders even though they live with Dylan, live where the partys are held. Their thoughts and actions are always just on the periphery of main conversations and the actions at the home. Neither one “makes it” in their field.
Assadi hits on what it’s like to be in a friendship like that when you’re the, even if only slightly, more grounded friend. There’s a serious question throughout whether or not Laura is going to party herself to death or not, and while she’s headed in that direction, is Ahlam going to fall with her, or be able to steady her? And all the while, Ahlam is occasionally heading back to Arizona to visit her father who has health issues of his own.
None of this is a world I’m overly familiar with—there would have been a much longer, louder discussion had I suggested to my parents that I head to NYC after high school with a buddy of mine. I also don’t know the odds on finding free living arrangements—even as an attractive young woman, that last for a couple of years of spiraling downward. But Assadi has made them believable with her writing and development of the two characters. I’d also be surprised to find that Assadi didn’t have some poetry in her background, or maybe even music—the writing is lyrical at times, lovely combinations of words that sing and it might takes half a paragraph to actually grasp the drudgery one or both of the girls were going through. It’s really quite lovely what Assadi does there and the book is a very quick read—between the writing, and the story, there wasn’t a lot of setting the book down. It’s a great debut by an author I look forward to reading more of in the future.
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