Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands

This spellbinding work from Nimr (A Little Piece of Ground) follows the adventures of Qamar, a young Palestinian woman. After Qamar is born in an unnamed, premodern village where only male children have been born for 50 years, her family is shunned. Despite this, she is raised in a loving home, and she becomes a voracious reader with an unquenchable desire for exploration. When Qamar is 15, her parents die, leaving her to set off on the first of many adventures. Qamar walks to Jerusalem and joins a caravan traveling to Egypt, where she is caught and sold as a slave. She eventually becomes the slave of, and then trusted adviser to, Princess Noor al-Huda. But when Noor is targeted in an assassination plot, Qamar escapes to Tangier. There, she learns from a renowned scholar, falls in love with a pirate captain, and disguises herself as a man in order to sail with him and his marauding crew. Qamar’s myriad journeys, while often outlandish, are moving and maintain the energy of the epic tales she read as a child. Nimr’s rip-roaring feminist folktale combines legend and history to great effect. (Nov.)