Habibi

For 14-year-old Liyana Abboud, life in St. Louis, Missouri is perfect. She loves shopping in the nearby stores and walking down streets where she knows everyone. Even better, she has just had her first kiss. But her father is moving the family to Jerusalem - the land where he was born.

Suddenly Liyana finds herself a stranger in a threatening world. Shopkeepers bargain in odd-sounding languages, soldiers roam the neighborhoods with guns, and kissing in public can be downright dangerous. At home with her family she is still Habibi - Precious. But to everyone else, she is only a half-American, half-Arab nobody. As the days stretch into months, Liyana wonders if she will ever find a place in her father's mixed-up homeland.

Naomi Shihab Nye's richly poetic prose won a Jane Addams Book Award and was an American Bookseller "Pick of the Lists." Christina Moore's moving performance will make listeners laugh and cry - and view the world from a whole new perspective.