Maybe Cypher intends Betty’s skin to stand in for the otherness of immigrants like Saeeda, her grandmother, and more specifically, her great-aunt Nuha. Nuha, who came to America from Nablus as a young adult, barely blinks at the blue skin and serves as nanny and fierce protector in Betty’s infancy. For years, the family keeps Betty swaddled and hidden away, avoiding public transportation, as if she’s E.T. and the government might take her away.
Nuha is a marvelous character, like a chain-smoking Mary Poppins. Much of this ambitious novel is told from the perspective of the young adult Betty, gay and contemplating leaving America to be with her lover, walking through her closeted aunt’s life story, narrating it to the now-dead Nuha in the second person. But the fussy, multilayered nature of all the “you” in the storytelling gets in the way; no one could be better equipped to tell their own story than Nuha Rummani.
Lily Miller, the central character in Wiz Wharton’s GHOST GIRL, BANANA (400 pp., Harper, $30), lost her mother, Sook-Yin, when she was so young that she has only two memories of her: that Sook-Yin smelled like watermelon and that their family, which includes an older sister, Maya, was happy. As this story of family secrets opens, Lily is 25 and a depressed, prickly Cambridge dropout who has not yet entirely recovered from a suicide attempt. Her dead mother squats in her brain “like a dripping tap or an unpaid bill.”
The unpaid bill reference is apt; one of Wharton’s key narrative themes is money and the damage it can do, from either the lack of it or the longing for it, and the corruptions and compromises that come with having it.
The barely employed Lily receives a letter from a lawyer in Hong Kong, informing her that she’s been left a half million pounds in the will of a powerful banker. She doesn’t know who he is, there’s no explanation of why, and there is a provision to the money: Lily needs to come to Hong Kong and sign for it before the end of his family’s 49-day mourning period. It’s 1997, just as the historic transfer of power from Britain to China is to take place.
