Book Review 6: The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher

Sarah Cypher: The Skin and Its Girl

Genres: Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Coming of Age, Domestic Fiction, Drama, Magical Realism, LGBTQIA+ Literature, American Literature, Lebanese Literature

Reading Level: Adult 

Setting: 2000s Oakland and Palo Alto, California (USA), Portland, Oregon (USA), Nablus, Palestine (West Bank) 

Published: 2024

Page Count: 330 (Paperback)

Content Warnings: Suicidal Thoughts, Attempted Suicide 

Rating: ★★★⭑ (3.5 out of 5)

First and foremost, Sarah Cypher’s The Skin and Its Girl is written in a bold and experimental second-person narration. It is from the perspective of Betty Rummani, as she talks directly to her late great aunt Nuha and recounts the events of the story by looking backwards. I enjoy the creative take that Cypher took with the narration style, though it is difficult to adjust to at first, as most readers are used to traditional first- and third-person narrations in fiction. The stylistic narration choice does (sort of) make sense in the context of the story; Betty’s aunt Nuha serves as a storyteller, relating anecdotes about Palestine, the Rumanni family history, and their old soap factory in Nablus to Betty. Frequently, she repeats the saying “there is no truth but in old women’s stories” (or to a similar effect). By the end of the novel, after Nina’s death, it is implied that Betty has taken Nuha’s “skin” (literally or figuratively, as we’ll get to), and so thus the implication is that Betty becomes the new Rumanni family storyteller, and the entire book is her telling a story, making the second-person narration relevant. Though it makes sense, and I applaud Cypher for choosing such a daring stylistic approach (especially in a debut novel), there were places in the book that the execution was confusing. Sometimes I was left unclear who was talking or acting and had to go back and reread to figure it out. 

The cast of characters and the semi-dysfunctional family dynamics at play in the novel are interesting. Though I do wish that the interpersonal romantic relationships had played a stronger role. Both Betty and Nuha are sapphic women (heavily implied to be lesbians, though this label is never explicitly used directly by Cypher in the text), something that Nuha personally struggles with, as she comes from both the older generation and a traditionally Christian Palestinian family. I love the intersectionality of traits and representation that Cypher employs—Christian, Palestinian-Arab, and Queer are not frequently combinations that people think stereotypically exist in any combined duo, let alone all together in a triumvirate. But of course, these multifaceted identities exist, and it was interesting to see them explored on the page. Unfortunately, though, neither Nuha or Betty’s lovers end up playing as strong of a role as I felt the story deserved. Nuha’s later-in-life secret girlfriend Cecelia makes brief, sporadic appearances throughout the novel, but she never feels properly fleshed out as a character, and so the impact of Nuha coming out to a young Betty at the end of the book falls a bit flat, and likewise, Cypher loses a prime opportunity to explore Betty’s understanding of coming to terms with her own sexuality in the context of what she knows about Nuha later in life, which would have strengthened the foil already existing between these two characters and made the ending—Betty’s essentially becoming Nuha—even more powerful. 

Betty’s own girlfriend, who she only ever refers to as her “beloved,” is also suspiciously absent. Perhaps this is because the novel only covers Betty’s early childhood, so we don’t ever get to see their relationship blossom, but leaving her completely unnamed is an odd choice to say the least. She plays a central role in Betty’s internal conflict—trying to decide whether to leave with her beloved and move to a new country or stay with her family—and given her centrality to the internal conflict the offsets the whole unraveling of the story, it feels appropriate that we should have gotten to know Betty’s beloved, some aspects of their relationship dynamic, even what country they were planning to go to, so the conflict raging inside Betty could be more properly developed. There was a point in the story I thought Cypher was going to reveal that the beloved was Betty’s childhood best friend Anna (as it’s mentioned that after their friendship crumbles during puberty that Anna will later leave a letter for Betty as an adult, and Anna mentions that her family is Swedish, which could imply Sweden was the country they planned to relocate to), but this never happens, and I’m not fully convinced it makes sense. With Betty’s beloved an unnamed background character and her family taking all the stage space, there really isn’t any reason for the reader to root for her to end up with her lover or feel connected to Betty’s struggle. We only see her relationship with her family, so naturally most readers will lean towards wanting Betty to stay. 

Maybe this was intentional on Cypher’s part. The whole story is a foil to Nuha’s past, in which we learn that Nuha wasn’t really a Rummani. She was a girl who ran away from her village when she was young to be with a woman in Haifa, but the woman abandoned her, and Nuha ended up adopted into the Rummani family. Betty is, therefore, not going to repeat her auntie’s mistake. She isn’t going to run away from her family to follow a woman she loves into a new place; she’s going to stay with the family. More romantic readers or diehard fans of the “found family” trope may be put off by this direction of the theme and the idea of Betty choosing a dysfunctional family over true love. However, I think the context of this being a family of Palestinian exiles, living scattered from each other all over the world, is important to understanding and embracing Cypher’s thematic choice. Preserving families and communities for the Rummanis (as well as, presumably, other Palestinians living in the diaspora) is imperative to preserving the Palestinian identity and culture. Also, given the context of Betty’s mother Tashi having severe mental health issues (frequently having suicidal thoughts and even having attempted suicide before), it makes sense that Betty would be hesitant to leave her behind. 

That being said, I will admit that while I don’t dislike that Betty chooses to stay with her family, I wish Cypher had been a bit more careful with her handling of the ending in terms of the actual mechanics of the writing. By the novel’s conclusion, I found myself confused as to whether Betty had chosen to stay or go. Maybe this is due to Cypher’s writing, or due to that it was late and I was tired but determined to finish the book before I fell asleep while reading, or maybe it was both, but I didn’t understand where Betty sat by the end. The only indication that I felt that she had chosen to stay was the final paragraph saying she pulled her skin tight around her neck, implying she was wearing the “skin” (literally or figuratively) that Nuha left behind before she died, implying even more that Betty is going to stay to be the keeper of the Rummani family as Nuha once was. I had to do a quick google search to confirm that I had interpreted the story’s conclusion correctly (if an interpretation can ever be definitely “right” or “wrong” when it comes to fiction), but the fact that I had to look it up at all isn’t exactly a good thing. 

While I may have found the conclusion a bit messy, I did like its open-ended-ness in terms of how the magical realism aspects of the story were handled. Some readers might have thought it a weakness that we never learned why Betty was born with blue skin, but I think this is actually a strength. Just as the characters in the novel don’t really question it much; they just accept that Betty is blue because she was born that way, the reader is forced to take the same approach. Betty is blue, and there is no grand “why.” It works well as a metaphor for racism and/or colorism. There’s also the unexplained nature of Nuha’s “skin” that can be interpreted either as literal or a metaphor (Cypher doesn’t force either version to fit better with the text). 

When Cypher presents Nuha’s backstory, she takes over the identity of the Rummani’s runaway daughter Nuha Rummani. She makes mention of being given a “skin suit” to wear after she takes over Nuha’s identity. Personally, I didn’t interpret this as literal. I took it to be a metaphor for assuming someone else’s identity, and the “tears” in the skin suit referred to moments in which Nuha betrayed her true self. This would make sense, as it wasn’t the first time Nuha ever used a fantastical metaphor to cover up a much darker true story. She used to tell Betty how a magical gazelle carried “the girl” (later revealed to be Nuha) to Haifa, but we learn later on that, of course, there was no magic gazelle. Really, Nuha had been lured by a disingenuous woman. She made up the story about the gazelle to make the story more mystical and less tragic. Therefore, the idea of the “skin suit” story works much the same way. Betty’s claims of seeing Nuha shed her skin before her death or of wearing Nuha’s skin don’t negate my interpretation outright. As Betty has taken over Nuha’s role in the family—including her role as the storyteller—she may simply be continuing Nuha’s tradition of passing down family lore and history with fairytale-like twists. That plays directly hand-in-hand with the book itself being told in second-person narration, implying that Betty is, in fact, telling a story the whole time. But the reader who likes the fantastical elements could choose to interpret these things as literal if they want; I just don’t prefer it. 

In the metaphorical analysis of the story, however, it does raise one alarming question about the book: is Betty even actually blue? After all, we never get any real explanation for it, and the way people react to her blueness seems (sometimes) unrealistic. And if Nuha can make up a story about herself being carried away to Haifa by a magic silver gazelle to mask a sadder personal truth, who’s to say Betty can’t make up a story about herself being born blue to hide sad personal truths as well? Presumably, Betty’s being born blue is what stops her mother from giving her up for adoption. It’s why children at school pick on her and bully her. Her mother is known to hide her from the public because of it. But in reality, we know that Betty is of Arab heritage living in America very shortly after 9/11. We even get a scene of her family scraping their “Free Palestine” bumper sticker off their car in the wake to help blend in and avoid discrimination. Is it possible that Betty is telling a fantastical, idealized version of a story where the truth is that she was bullied for being Palestinian, that her prospective adoptive parents decided against having a Middle Eastern child in post-9/11 America, that her mother wanted to hide her because of racism? Just as Nuha’s true backstory is sadder than that of the mysticism of the gazelle story, this version of Betty’s life would certainly be sadder than just being born blue beyond all logic. It also offered her a way to connect to her family’s heritage in Palestine, despite never having been there herself, they did make blue soap. As far as her sudden psychic abilities during puberty, again, I interpret this as Betty mystifying her own past instead of talking about the trials and tribulations of puberty. I don’t know. And I like that I don’t know. I like that Cypher is really leaving the whole thing so open that I can ponder things like this, and I’d love to read literary theories about this book someday. I only hope its popularity increases, so that other theories start to be produced. 

Book review 6 of ~5,000 lifetime goal.