Meanwhile, outside the family's apartment, a storm is brewing in Bay Ridge. A raid on a local business sparks a protest that brings the Arab community together, and a senseless act of violence threatens to tear them apart. Everyone's motives are called into question as an alarming sense of disquiet pervades the neighborhood. With everything spiraling out of control, how will Amira and Lina know who they can trust?
A gorgeously written, intimate family story and a polyphonic portrait of life under the specter of Islamophobia, Between Two Moons challenges the reader to interrogate their own assumptions, asking questions of allegiance to faith, family, and community, and what it means to be a young Muslim in America.
Aisha Abdel Gawad has been published in The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and the scholarly journal The Muslim World in a special issue on Anglophone Muslim women writers. She won a 2015 Pushcart Prize for her short story "Waking Luna." After graduating college, Aisha worked at the Arab American Association of New York, a community center and social services agency serving the immigrant community in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. She is currently a high school English teacher in Connecticut.