Historical fiction. This was a really good multigenerational story. Most of the drama was in the lives of the characters such that you'll learn about the Nakba and Israeli violence in an organic way. The consequences of displacement are more far reaching than people might expect and the characters all handle it differently. 

If you are reading this in 2024, the events in the story will hit even harder. The events in the book occurred before 2013. In 2014, Israel launched a seven day offensive with much death and destruction. So you keep thinking - but as bad as this is, they have no idea what's in store if they survive this. 

So even a happy ending for the characters in the short term ends up uncertain. I can't fathom how they'd fare in this wave of genocide. Or does the sadness lie in the fact that we do know? We are watching the genocide livestreamed. Buried in the rubble, limbs blown off. Get to a hospital with life threatening injuries, death by bombing. Run to a school, death by bombing. Stand in line for food, death by bombing. Walk outside to get water, death by sniper. Call for help like Hind, get shot 355 times. Write a poem like Refaat, death by bombing. Go south, go north, go here, go there where we absolutely won't bomb, death by bombing. Get rounded up, zip tied and shot to death. Help an injured person in the street, death by sniper. Watch soldiers throw flour and food from your home at each other while wearing your bra and jewelry while you starve to death because Israel won't allow aid in - and has deemed the aid workers' organizations terrorists via coerced false confessions extracted by waterboarding.

The next chapters of these Nakba stories I absolutely dread. But you need to read them. We have to stop Israel in this inhumanity, occupation, apartheid, genocide.