Arab Boy Delivered

by Paul Aziz Zarou

This is a sensitively-written and heartfelt book about an Arab family pursuing the American Dream in the late 1960s. It’s an important story, and I learned a great deal from their travails—both about the complexities of Arab-American identity and about the issues facing all immigrants to this country. It’s a very timely novel about a subject that needs this kind of in-depth exploration.

—Stephen Fife, author, The 13th Boy: A Memoir of Education and Abuse

Genres: Fiction

240 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2022

Reviews

[Sam Bahour · Rating 3 out of 5]

When fellow Palestinian American, Paul Aziz Zarou, asked me if I would be interested in reading his newly published novel, I did not hesitate to accept the offer. His email came on the same day I had just completed proofreading another forthcoming book, a family memoir of a dear friend, which is fraught with the heavy and mind-boggling history of Palestine. So, I felt reading this novel would be a good break.

Although I'm not into fiction as much as I should be, the title of this novel piqued my interest, Arab Boy Delivered. Being an Arab boy myself, I just had to find out what this novel's boy was being "delivered" from or to.

My hunch was I would be relating to this novel in a personal way. Boy, was I right, even though my slow-paced hometown of Youngstown, Ohio has little resemblance to hustling and bustling Queens, New York, where the story unravels.

Not having personally experienced all of the many entangled themes of the story, a few hit me like a brick, like the brick that the "Boy" disposes of in the novel's closing 😉.

The story is set in the late 1960s and revolves around an immigrant family trying to make ends meet in an America that was not the paradise it was envisioned to be. The novel grapples with multi-generational challenges, immigrant children, a life that revolves around a grocery business, family, community, education, love, violence, crime, and so much more.

Having grown up with both parents being hard-working, self-employed grocers, Arab Boy Delivered offered a refreshing flashback to those years gone by. One theme, in particular, struck home, the difficult decision to exit a successful family business to pursue one’s professional career related to one's education.

After having lived half of my life in America as an American-born Palestinian-Lebanese American and the other half in Palestine as a "returning" Palestinian, one thing is certain. It is becoming harder by the day to distinguish fiction from non-fiction.

Paul Zarou is a writer and business professional in the technology space, a profile I immediately related to. I congratulate him on this novel and look forward to reading his next.

Sam Bahour
ePalestine.ps

[Mirna Cocoma · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was interesting to read. Definitely a coming of age book. I liked that it told the story of different people in the community, and how these interactions affected the main character Michael.