Book: Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm
Reviewed by Rallie X
Rating: 5/5
Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for giving me a copy of the audiobook, this review and opinions are my own.
Our Cut of Salt is a really important book - it comes out in a time when the current genocide in Gaza has been going on for nearly three years, so exploring generational trauma of genocide through horror and the lens of a haunted house feels really apt to me., and the audiobook narrator brings an extra air of urgency and emotionality to the story.
Deena Helm does an incredible job weaving together the three generations of women and giving them all a distinct flavor and clear purpose. I love how she relegated Nuhad to a past-ness, gave Marina the real sense of present, and had Haifa as a kind of disjointed middle unable to quite connect the two on her own. Nuhad gets a present, but it is only a present reflected/remembered through others, which matches so well the city itself (city-Haifa still exists but not as itself, and is only remembered through the eyes of the ones who survived the Nakba). We also have the present of the House, which is a character all unto itself, and the one through which Helm is able to deliver the most devastating lines -
Now, it's the sickness, the one that slithers through the wet stones and rotted wood. The sickness that festers far beneath the roots, into the blackened depths of the drowning sea. The sickening things of 1948, the settlers, sick. Leaving me with nothing but emptiness.
This book belongs in classrooms and book clubs, it deserves the kind of in-depth discussion that really doesn't belong in a review but suffice it to say: Nuhad's house is haunted, Haifa is haunted, all of Palestine is haunted - the spectre of genocide is ever-present and Helm brings just one family's haunting into view with the clear knowledge that this is not just one family. The bullet holes that Marina sees when she first gets to Haifa are scars that cannot be healed while their source is still present.