In 2014, Anna Werner experiences a “horrible, life-altering, forever disaster” when she suffers a rare spinal stroke that renders her tetraplegic. She tenaciously labors to reclaim control over her body, but the progress is painfully slow. Making matters worse, her girlfriend, Julia, leaves her, and her doctor seems less than optimistic regarding her recovery. Distraught, Anna contemplates a release from the prison of her inert body through suicide. At the hospital, she meets Batul al-Jaberi, a Syrian immigrant working as a janitor who aspires to become a doctor. Batul is tenderly attentive to Anna’s needs, and the pair become close friends, their relationship flirting with the possibility of blossoming into more. In the moving, sensitive narrative, Batul requites Anna’s attraction but is profoundly uncomfortable with her own feelings, which are prohibited by the religious culture within which she grew up. “She was drawn to Anna. It was wrong. And it was safe. Because Anna would never be drawn to her, not in the same way, not with the same obsessive thoughts.” This is both a queer love story and a searching meditation on what happens when human longing is thwarted by an intractable reality. Silberstein’s writing is spare and economical; its simplicity is the source of its considerable power. There is no maudlin drama here, no breathless overstatement—with impressive restraint, the author plumbs the depths of these two fascinatingly complex protagonists and the deals they must strike with themselves in order to make their lives livable: “She loved her because she loved her. If she could heal her by trading places, she would not hesitate. If she needed her, she would do anything.”
