Tower of Dreams [a novel]

An innocent yet stinging—and always absorbing—account of the lives of two young expatriate girls in Kuwait in the 1960s. Isabel, the red-headed daughter of an American mother and Arab father, befriends Laila, whose family has left the lush, cool mountains of Lebanon in search of a better life in the heat and desert of Kuwait. Abdul-Baki presents the voices of both girls, telling their stories in present time and flashback, from the day they met in the first grade through their high school graduation.