It Won't Always Be Like This
A Graphic Memoir
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An intimate graphic memoir about an American girl growing up with her Egyptian father’s new family, forging unexpected bonds and navigating adolescence in an unfamiliar country—from the award-winning author of I Was Their American Dream.
“What a joy it is to read Malaka Gharib’s It Won’t Always Be Like This, to have your heart expertly broken and put back together within the space of a few panels, to have your wonder in the world restored by her electric mind.”—Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Book Riot
It’s hard enough to figure out boys, beauty, and being cool when you’re young, but even harder when you’re in a country where you don’t understand the language, culture, or social norms.
Nine-year-old Malaka Gharib arrives in Egypt for her annual summer vacation abroad and assumes it'll be just like every other vacation she's spent at her dad's place in Cairo. But her father shares news that changes everything: He has remarried. Over the next fifteen years, as she visits her father's growing family summer after summer, Malaka must reevaluate her place in his life. All that on top of maintaining her coolness!
Malaka doesn't feel like she fits in when she visits her dad--she sticks out in Egypt and doesn't look anything like her fair-haired half siblings. But she adapts. She learns that Nirvana isn't as cool as Nancy Ajram, that there's nothing better than a Fanta and a melon-mint hookah, and that her new stepmother, Hala, isn't so different from Malaka herself.
It Won’t Always Be Like This is a touching time capsule of Gharib’s childhood memories—each summer a fleeting moment in time—and a powerful reflection on identity, relationships, values, family, and what happens when it all collides.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gharib's empathetic second graphic memoir, a follow-up to I Was Their American Dream, covers culture clashes, family clashes, and identity mash-ups, set in the late '90s to the early 2000s. In her tween years, Malaka—who normally lives with her Filipina mother in Los Angeles—spends summers in Egypt with her father and stepmother, Hala. She and Hala, who is initially "more like a big sister," enjoy each other's company, but Malaka misses her dad when he works long hours and feels like a third wheel once her stepsiblings are born. She doesn't speak much Arabic, which makes it hard to bond with the relatives in her extended family. As she finds her American identity in ska music, she resents Hala's growing religiosity and her father's notions of what a "young lady" should be. "Dad, I don't know if you noticed, but I'm into subculture," Malaka scolds. But as Malaka grows, so too does her grace toward her father and for Hala, who has more going on beneath her abaya than she lets on, as Gharib disrupts and complicates cultural stereotypes. Gharib's drawings are freehanded and energetic, with brightly detailed marketplaces, beach scenes, and cityscapes, peppered with excerpts from Gharib's actual adolescent diaries. This work will resonate with any comics memoir fan who felt like a fish out of water growing up, and promises teen crossover appeal.