The Map of Salt and Stars is a powerful story of struggle, sorrow, hope, and love. The story follows Nour, a young girl whose family is forced out of their home in Homs, Syria by the outbreak of the civil war, and Rawiya, a tenacious girl centuries earlier who embarks on a journey across the Mediterranean.

The mirrored stories of Rawiya and Nour created a beautiful symmetry in the plot while deriving meaning from both. Nour, in trying to understand what is happening to her family, and through the grief of lost loved ones, discovers the true meaning of her family’s history, and what it means to find home after everything she knows is destroyed. Meanwhile, Rawiya, in becoming a mapmaker’s apprentice, finds the adventure she’d been seeking, and reveals her own power as a brave warrior and cunning tactician.

The characters’ journeys follow each other from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. This structure makes the overall narrative familiar, but the twists and turns that take each character from one location to the next propel the plot forward from chapter to chapter.

The very real circumstances around Nour’s family — war, hunger, a refugee crisis in the making — are contrasted well by the more fantastical dangers of Rawiya’s journey fraught with dashing princes, mythical creatures, and magical stones.

Zeyn Joukhadar is an emotive writer, whose prose was thoughtful and intricate without being overly embellished.

The audio version was fantastic, but I think this is a story worth reading on the page. This is definitely a candidate to buy in hard cover for the home bookshelf.

Steve D