Nidali, the rebellious daughter of an Egyptian-Greek mother and a Palestinian father, narrates the story of her childhood in Kuwait, her teenage years in Egypt (to where she and her family fled the 1990 Iraqi invasion), and her family's last flight to Texas. Nidali mixes humor with a sharp, loving portrait of an eccentric middle-class family, and this perspective keeps her buoyant through the hardships she encounters: the humiliation of going through a checkpoint on a visit to her father's home in the West Bank; the fights with her father, who wants her to become a famous professor and stay away from boys; the end of her childhood as Iraq invades Kuwait on her thirteenth birthday; and the scare she gives her family when she runs away from home. Funny, charming, and heartbreaking, A Map of Home is the kind of book Tristram Shandy or Huck Finn would have narrated had they been born Egyptian-Palestinian and female in the 1970s.

Publisher Description

As a young man living in rural Kansas in the 1940s, Charles Novak took a job with the federal government--not because he liked the work but because he heard it paid well. That job shaped his life in ways he could never have imagined. As a surveyor for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, Charles was tasked with measuring the unmapped American landscape. Over the years this would take him from being eaten up by mosquitoes in Alaska, to eating steak and lobster on oil rigs in Louisiana. His career became even more adventurous when his family later hit the road with him, making their home in a caravan of trailers as the survey team traversed the nation. The measurements taken by Charles and the team eventually helped build today's GPS technology. But such a contribution was the furthest thing from the minds of Charles and his family as they experienced life on the road during a time of astounding change in American life. From segregated trains, to Cold War military bases, and back to Kansas, Charles's family found that home is more than a place on a map.

From America to the Middle East and back again— the sparkling story of one girl’s childhood, by an exciting new voice in literary fiction In this fresh, funny, and fearless debut novel, Randa Jarrar chronicles the coming-of-age of Nidali, one of the most unique and irrepressible narrators in contemporary fiction. Born in 1970s Boston to an Egyptian-Greek mother and a Palestinian father, the rebellious Nidali—whose name is a feminization of the word “struggle”—soon moves to a very different life in Kuwait. There the family leads a mildly eccentric middle-class existence until the Iraqi invasion drives them first to Egypt and then to Texas. This critically acclaimed debut novel is set to capture the hearts of everyone who has ever wondered what their own map of home might look like.

In the poem that opens this career-spanning odyssey, a blind weaver, who is at once a grandmotherly Penelope and a Homeric bard, “maps you home”—home finally, as the concluding poem reveals, to the Swamp Fox-haunted lowlands of Havird’s native South. Along the way, which threads through Hardy’s Wessex, the Greece of Homer and Seferis, and Jack London’s Valley of the Moon, we take our bearings in “elliptical” terrain, as Rosanna Warren describes the typical setting—landscapes through whose gaps emerge the ghosts of memory and myth to engage the living in scenes of infinite moment. In Map Home, as in Havird’s award-winning chapbook, Penelope’s Design—but amply here—“the memories of ‘a dream-disheveled child’ in the Deep South unfold,” as Eleanor Wilner observes, “into the meditative travels of the literary man in elegant poems riddled with starlight.”

See how a boy makes a map of his home showing fire escape routes. Simple text takes early readers step by step through the types of features a fire safety map needs to have.