Emily M’s Reviews > The Skin and Its Girl > Status Update

"'I hate all humans.' You adjusted your grip on the needle... 'Oh, chickpea, no. You don't. The whole problem is just a broken heart.' I said 'Ew' and shoved the whole handful of almonds in my mouth... 'Love whoever you want. But if you can, love a good person who will love you back, unless you want your heart to cry like a gazelle cornered by a hundred lions...And drink some water before you choke on...my snacks.'"

"Why leave paradise for a gazelle? Because there is no paradise. Because the body is alive and wants the future. Because places have no self-knowledge; they are only known by others...Because that woman's mouth fit against yours. Because she wanted a life with you in other cities, among strangers. Because recognition is rare."

"The gazelle's coat glittered with the dust of other horizons, promising the future....Do you know what it's like to be bewitched?...Nobody can stand it - that's the point of falling in love...The girl loved the gazelle for taking her to freedom, and so long as they were together, as long as they belonged to each other, the girl was blind to everything else. Love is forgetting."

“The place where the real borders existed was in the mind, and my mother found herself caught on the wrong side of an invisible barrier as high as the West Bank separation wall…You had counseled confidence, even defiance, and had said that these nosy people would wilt if only she put enough steel in her spine…But my mother’s upbringing had taught her only how to be quietly uncomfortable”

“I had already taken the relevant conclusions from the fact that I had no crushes but on girls…I had already found books on Palestine and queer kids and Krishna and the blue people of Appalachia; about migration…and how language shapes the brain. I had learned that trees might communicate…heard all kinds of fairy tales, and for every new thing I learned…the world only became ever larger, my hunger for it keener.”

“A story you’d told came back to her, about a woman who became a flock of birds and broke the neck of one each night to feed her child. Diminishing herself one tiny body at a time. Is that what motherhood was - being nothing but a living list, self-disintegrating with each task that got crossed off?”
Oof

“‘It says I don’t have the resources to ensure the wellbeing of a medically sensitive child’… ‘Smallah look at her, she is all health and energy!’ But that was my mother’s point. Other than us, no one else in the world would agree that I was fine…It’s what Tashi had been warning from the beginning, the perfectly lucid concern everyone had dismissed because she had been the one to say it.”

“Thus Babel became the predecessor of every faraway city that would ever be translated to a plume of smoke…When we humans finally tore our gazes from the rubble…the Lord noticed that there were a million of us and only one of it…It assigned us districts and put up checkpoints and required ID cards…it changed the colors of our skins and implemented a randomized system of worship requirements…”

“‘The girl is the soul of our old factory?’ Someone laughed. ‘Wallahi, I had no idea buildings have souls. Outhouses were lost in the bombing too. What sort of creature do you think was born from them?’ ‘Hush. The girl is half Rummani, yes, but no one has accounted for the father. Surely the blue came from him.’ ‘Impossible. He’s Lutheran. And midwestern. They don’t even put spices in their food.’”
😂