The Girl Who Fell to Earth: A Memoir
4/5
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About this ebook
Award-winning filmmaker and writer Sophia Al-Maria’s The Girl Who Fell to Earth is a funny and wry coming-of-age memoir about growing up in between American and Gulf Arab cultures. Part family saga and part personal quest, The Girl Who Fell to Earth traces Al-Maria’s journey to make a place for herself in two different worlds.
When Sophia Al-Maria's mother sends her away from rainy Washington State to stay with her husband's desert-dwelling Bedouin family in Qatar, she intends it to be a sort of teenage cultural boot camp. What her mother doesn't know is that there are some things about growing up that are universal. In Qatar, Sophia is faced with a new world she'd only imagined as a child. She sets out to find her freedom, even in the most unlikely of places.
The Girl Who Fell to Earth takes readers from the green valleys of the Pacific Northwest to the dunes of the Arabian Gulf and on to the sprawling chaos of Cairo. Struggling to adapt to her nomadic lifestyle, Sophia is haunted by the feeling that she is perpetually in exile: hovering somewhere between two families, two cultures, and two worlds. She must make a place for herself—a complex journey that includes finding young love in the Arabian Gulf, rebellion in Cairo, and, finally, self-discovery in the mountains of Sinai.
The Girl Who Fell to Earth heralds the arrival of an electric new talent and takes us on the most personal of quests: the voyage home.
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Reviews for The Girl Who Fell to Earth
12 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This memoir recalled Sophia Al-Maria's life traveling between two different cultures. She is a very good writer and does a great job describing in detail her life living in small town United States and in Qatar.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is the book that I kept reading even though I really wasn't sure that I should. My reading time is precious, and it is hard for me to decide when to stop. Given that this was a short book, and the premise of the memoir caught my attention, I did read it all the way through. Unfortunately, it still fell flat for me. The writing was too matter-of-fact, and the use of the constellations as chapter titles felt forced. The story is interesting in that it illustrates how growing up bi-cultural can lead to some serious confusion for a young woman, but all in all, the tale just disappointed me.