Alligator

Starred review from February 10, 2020
Alzayat’s slim, powerful debut collection showcases the author’s deep empathy and imagination in stories about grief, assimilation, and trauma. She begins with the quietly explosive “Ghusl,” in which a young woman named Zaynab prepares the body of her younger brother, Hamoud, for burial. Though her movements are methodical as she progresses through the rites, her thoughts are erratic and all-consuming, bouncing from memories of herself and Hamoud as children to the political strife in their unnamed country that claimed first their father and then Hamoud. In “Only Those Who Struggle Succeed,” a young intern named Lina attempts to climb the corporate ladder of a film production company, only to find herself made vulnerable at every turn by her race, gender, and class. The title story takes as inspiration the true-life 1929 lynching of a Syrian man in Florida. With a mix of historical newspaper clippings, literary narrative, and imagined internet comments from white supremacists, Alzayat
contextualizes the lynching with violence against the black community while tracing the imagined futures of the children of the lynched man, successfully using the trauma carried by refugees, immigrants, and their children as a through line in the history of violence in the U.S. This intelligent collection is a force to be reckoned with.

April 1, 2020
While the tales in Alzayat's debut book of short stories are only loosely thematically linked, each story displays a strong point of view and manages to be uniquely the author's own. The title piece references the true story of a Syrian immigrant lynched with the aid of law enforcement in a Florida town in 1929. Alzayat uses multiple voices from history in the form of diary entries, social media posts, and newspaper clippings, to tell both individual stories and a larger history of racial violence in the U.S. This method is ambitious and successfully creates a feeling greater than plot and character development. While many stories focus on Syrian characters (Alzayat was born in Damascus), the topics range widely, from a young woman passing as white while she works her way up the corporate ladder, to a man working in a call center on 9/11, to a woman having to perform burial rites for her brother. The collection may falter in places but it definitely signals a writer to watch.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)