I read this entire book (it’s short) on the flight home from New York on New Year’s Day.

I’m so happy that my first Book Club post ever is on a book that made me swoon with re-readable pages: Home Is Not a Country, by Safia Elhillo. This is a book you’ll find on the Young Adult shelves of the bookstore, but as I’m forever telling Rusty, great YA is every bit as meaningful and worthy of our time as fiction written for adults. And this is great YA.

Written in verse that flows like a river, it’s the story of Nima, a Sudanese immigrant growing up in an American suburb. Her tale of self-discovery and belonging takes a unique turn when she begins to imagine (or really see?) that she seems to be growing transparent. Around the same time, she begins to imagine (or really see?) a ghostly girl that is a better version of herself. Nima and her almost-self travel back in time together and the rest is nothing short of magical.

I read the whole beautiful thing on our flight home from New York on January 1, which is my father’s birthday.

He died in 2006. Most years since then I make a point of climbing a hill on New Year’s Day, to a spot with a view where I can sit by myself and try with all my might to connect with him.

My mom died in May of 2023, which gutted me entirely, and which you’ll surely hear more about if I keep blogging here. But one bittersweet consolation is that since she died my long-gone father has been showing up in my dreams super frequently, and differently than before she died. Before my mom died, whenever I’d see my dad in my dreams, a point would come where I’d suddenly remember that he was actually dead, and that this dream-meeting with him was fleeting and I was losing him all over again. I’d panick and cling to him and wake up crying.

But now he’s just there in my dreams, being fatherly and solid, the good guy who knows what we’re all supposed to be doing, whatever the dream is about. When I wake up there’s a pang of missing, but mostly I’m just glad I got to see him and grateful for the visit.

Full disclosure: I’m behind on getting this site launched, and I’m actually already reading my third book of 2025. So posts will be harshly truncated (like this one) until I catch up and can be writing in real time about what I’m reading.

But before I publish this, let me set the stage for one more thing I’ll be writing about here: MUSIC. In my year of much reading last year, I was struck by how often music was woven into what I was reading, across genres. Jazz in Murakami, opera in Bel Canto, rock in David Mitchell, etc., etc. It became a mini-side quest to always have a listen to music featured in the books, and as often as not I found myself introduced to something completely new to me. In Home Is Not a Country, this is Nima’s favorite song: