Our Cut of Salt

Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm, 288 pages.

When Nuhad was a girl, she was forced out of her ancestral home by massacre. She named her daughter Haifa, to never forget the home she would never see again. But her home remembers her too, and it's grief and rage has twisted it into something dangerous, the kind of house that people cross the street to avoid and the unwary disappear from. After her grandmother's death, Marina visits Palestine to try to connect with the family history that has been kept from, but Haifa has enough secrets and tragedies to drown in. 

This was a powerful book that wasn't at all what I expected it to be. Although marketed as a haunted house book, the murderous house is realistically one of the less disturbing things in this book. This book is not remotely subtle. Colonialism is frequently the true horror, but that is usually more subtext than laid out directly on the page. That being said, I don't know that this book needs to be subtle. Helm lays out the horrors of living under occupation unflinchingly, and while the unrelenting tragedy is sometimes hard to read, it is also emotionally effective. I would have liked to see the house used a little more effectively, and it wouldn't have hurt her to let at least a few metaphors go unexplained, but this is still definitely a very strong debut from an under-represented population. 

This book will be published September 22, 2026