Yasmin Zaher’s stellar debut never lets the reader get quite comfortable in its prose, and it is in that discomfort The Coin finds its brilliance. New York feels, at times, surreal through the eyes of the narrator, who slips further and further into what I can only describe as a justifiable madness. As the narrator stumbles through a life forced upon her in America, she becomes increasingly more untethered to her life. Her homeland, Palestine, is out of reach, and in flashbacks to her childhood, we can glimpse the parts of herself she left there. Zaher ruminates on statelessness, nature, opulence, and beauty in the narrator’s slow spiral. The Coin is an incredible debut!
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, (List Price: $27, Catapult, 9781646222100, July 2024)
Reviewed by Kelsey Jagneaux, Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida