Tomboy

I've always felt illegal at passport checkpoints. Without correct papers. Always expect to be ejected from the line of passengers, surrounded and seized by two police officers, then taken to a small room. Who are you? Where are you from? Where are you going?

Apparently largely autobiographical, Tomboy is the story of Yasmina/Nina/Jasmine, born to an Algerian father and a French mother only a few years after the very bloody liberation war, growing up in Algiers with a boy for a best friend, which works fine as long as they're children. But then she reaches puberty and gradually becomes aware of what she is by what she is not; female, mixed-race, tomboyish, gay, too foreign in both of her home countries, she faces a low-key but constant barrage of everything from open racist hostility to well-meaning can-I-pet-the-dog curiosity from all those who recognise her as Something Different, while the climate hardens in both Algeria and France. Yada yada yada, important, yeah, but we've heard that before. What makes it fresh is the way she tells it, both in the detail, all the tiny little impressions that make up everyday life, and in that prose, all short sentences bouncing off and contrasting and contradicting and expanding on each other. Reading Bouraoui is like putting together a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, where you find yourself admiring both the individual pieces and the finished product, but it's the act of watching it all come together to form a whole that stays with you.