This was one of the books I read for the BookTube Prize Quarterfinals judging this year. I hadn’t heard of it before, and probably wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. But I’m glad I did, because it was a very interesting book, both in content and structure.
This book is told in individual chapters, each more or less stand alone, and each is about a different person. But they all connect – through family members and their shared cultural background. All the characters are part of an ex-pat community of Lebanese immigrants living in Baltimore. They all have their own struggles – poverty, loss, infidelity, cultural differences and how this impacts different people’s reactions to one another’s life choices and mistakes.
I struggled a lot with the interconnected element of the book. Perhaps because I was reading it as an audiobook and couldn’t flip back to previous chapters, perhaps just because the chapters aren’t that long and it was hard to keep track. Whatever the reason, I found that it worked best for me if I just read it as individual stories rather than looking for the connections, because I found that stressful and distracting.
The actual stories themselves, however, were beautifully written accounts of the ways in which cultural and generational differences affect a growing family and how we each deal with our perceived and actual responsibilities to our families and ancestral history. In these stories, Darraj explores longing for home, fractured families, death and domestic abuse with tenderness and understanding. I felt for most of the characters I met in this book, though I wished I had longer with some of them.
Because we only have such small insights into their lives, we rarely see either the history or the outcome of their stories, and some of them had a lot going on! This is the problem I often have with books written in this format – they cover a lot more perspectives, but they aren’t able to give as much time to any of them. It’s definitely a trade-off, and there are merits to both. I did feel like I would have liked a little more time with some of the stories in this book, but also valued the range of experiences.
This is another book I hadn’t heard of and likely wouldn’t have read without the BookTube Prize, but that I’m glad I had a reason to read it. It was thought-provoking and brought up a lot of the unique things that immigrants have to deal with while balancing their family lives with a new country that works very differently, and often judges harshly. Well worth a read.
An exciting debut novel that gives voice to the diverse residents of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore—from young activists in conflict with their traditional parents to the poor who clean for the rich—lives which intersect across divides of class, generation, and religion.
Funny and touching, Behind You Is the Sea brings us into the homes and lives of three main families—the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars—Palestinian immigrants who’ve all found a different welcome in America.
Their various fates and struggles cause their community dynamic to sizzle and sometimes explode: The wealthy Ammar family employs young Maysoon Baladi, whose family struggles financially, to clean up after their spoiled teenagers. Meanwhile, Marcus Salameh, whose aunt married into the wealthy Ammar family, confronts his father in an effort to protect his younger sister for “dishonoring” the family. Only a trip to Palestine, where Marcus experiences an unexpected and dramatic transformation, can bridge this seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two generations.
Behind You Is the Sea faces stereotypes about Palestinian culture head-on and, shifting perspectives to weave a complex social fabric replete with weddings, funerals, broken hearts, and devastating secrets. – Goodreads
Book Title: Behind You Is the Sea
Author: Susan Muaddi Darraj
Series: No
Edition: Audiobook (Kobo)
Published By: HarperVia
Released: January 16, 2024
Genre: Fiction, Palestine, Family, Immigration, Culture
Pages: 256
Date Read: February 4-5, 2025
Rating: 7.5/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 4.09/5 (6,319 ratings)
BookTube Prize Quarterfinals Judging 2025 Rank: 3/6