Brooklyn resident explores life in New York in debut novel

Brooklyn BookBeat

March 30, 2017 By Ellyn Gaydos Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Hannah Lilith Assadi. Photo by Ulysse Payet

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Hannah Lilith Assadi’s debut novel “Sonora” is a dark, coming-of-age tale best suited for those coming of age themselves. The book dips in and out of the young adult lives of Ahlam and her best friend Laura. They befriend each other going to school in Sonora, a place dominated by desert, violent weather and packs of coyotes. Ahlam’s father is a Palestinian refugee who drives a cab while her Israeli mother waits tables. The strangeness of their pairing and their mutual displacement is what keeps them together in the not always sympathetic desert town.

Laura and Ahlam too share a bond unique to outcasts as small-town goths working at a pizzeria, practicing drinking and boys together. When their classmates begin to die inexplicably at the hands of the desert the friends become convinced Sonora is cursed and as soon as they finish high school, escape to Brooklyn.

Ahlam dreams of becoming a ballerina and Laura a singer. The two crash with Dylan, an artist who makes $100,000 “chandeliers” in his Gowanus loft strewn with half functional instruments and graffiti. They move in soon before 9/11 to escape the desert, but what they find along the abandoned and polluted Gowanus Canal and the run-down streets of their new neighborhood provides little comfort.

Neither one “makes it” in New York. Ahlam tears her meniscus and eventually stops dancing, spending her time waiting tables and going to parties. Laura burns bright, singing a few shows at first, even getting the chance to record an album, but is soon consumed by drugs, her infatuation with Dylan and her own fragile mental state.

Ahlam reflects, “I slowly lost any dream of myself … No one told me that you can wake up years past and not understand the person you are, the things you did the night before the things you said, the things left undone, that it can feel like a nightmare, a wildly seductive spinning nightmare.”

Arranged in intermittent months, the narrative is interspersed with Ahlam visiting her father at the hospital while he recovers from surgery years later. The book is a reflection on the past told with an easy exchange between the waking and dreaming world, the living and the dead. Losing site of her dreams and the friendship to Laura that tethered her, Ahlam inherits the displacement of her immigrant parents. After many lost years in Brooklyn, she moves back to Arizona with the possibility of new beginning in the very place she started.

Like Ahlam, author Hannah Lillith Assadi was raised in Arizona by a Palestinian father and Jewish mother. She now lives in Brooklyn. Assadi read in the borough earlier this month and will appear at the New York Public Library in June. “Sonora,” published by Soho Press, was released in March.