RaveThe Coachella Review... a line, like so many others in the collection, that stops the reader, makes the eye pass over it again and again. A language. A culture. Like the lines we reread, Shah makes us question: What do we use? What are we expected to use? ... Shah does have these sorrows we can use, and she gives them to us wrapped in a beautiful fabric of words. These essays—many of which border on poetry—explore and contemplate the experiences of an American other and the languages lost, found, and inherited for children of immigrants. Each piece, whether about cooking, weddings, traveling in both foreign and familiar places, carries the weight of Shah’s history, the history of her blood, and the history of a language we never knew we used until we start to read.
