She decided to call herself Zebra as she looked at the stripes cast across her father's casket by the sun. After she and her father had wandered in exile following a harrowing escape from their homeland of Iran, where a young Zebra witnessed her mother's death, they had become the world to each other. So his passing in New York has left Zebra unmoored. Raised in a highly literary family and finding meaning more in books than in the intellectual rodents whom she was taught to believe make up most of the human population, Zebra decides to retrace her exiled wanderings as preparation for writing a manifesto that will connect the threads of all the literature she has been steeped in throughout her life. This plan, however, is interrupted by a man she meets in Barcelona, who aggravates and intrigues her at the same time. Van der Vliet Oloomi's extravagant, sometimes overwrought prose, like her obsessive heroine, will not suit everyone. But for those willing to expend the effort, Call Me Zebra offers an arresting exploration of grief alongside a powder keg of a romance.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist

In Bibi Abbas Abbas Hosseini, who renames herself Zebra after her father's death, Oloomi (Fra Keeler) presents the reader with a prickly, funny, often-exasperating character whose story comes to encompass the trials and tribulations of the many exiles in our modern world. This expansive novel spans both the globe from Iran to New York City and the picaresque adventures of its title character. Young Bibi's family fled Saddam Hussein's violent regime, but while the girl and her father made their way to New York, her mother was killed during the journey. When Bibi's father dies more than ten years later, the young woman decides to undertake a "Grand Tour of Exile," retracing in reverse the route she and her father took from Iran to America. Along the way, she gathers other exiles-a group she dubs "The Pilgrims of the Void"-and meets Ludo Bembo, a young man with whom she reluctantly falls in love. Yet Zebra never abandons her first and truest love, the written word. Told by her father to "trust nobody and love nothing except literature," Zebra weaves philosophy, literary theory, and historical knowledge into her own personal "manifesto" while seeking and finding connections-both hidden and overt-between and among the world's works of literature. That this lonely, brave, fiercely intelligent young woman begins to realize she must connect to other people (not just books) makes this novel all the more poignant. Leila Buck's narration, which brings Zebra's story to life in all its complexity, is a perfect fit. -VERDICT Highly recommended. ["This fierce meditation on life and love, a tour de force by self-proclaimed literary terrorist Oloomi, is one that many will read and reread": LJ 12/17 review of the Houghton Harcourt hc.]-Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

In Oloomi's rich and delightful novel (after Fra Keeler), 22-year-old Zebra is the last in a long line of "Autodidacts, Anarchists, Atheists" exiled from early '90s Iran. Years after her family's harrowing escape, alone in New York after the death of her father (her mother died in their flight to the Kurdish border), Zebra decides to revisit some of the places where she has lived in an effort to both retrace her family's dislocation and to compose a grand manifesto on the meaning of literature. Like Don Quixote, one of her favorite characters, Zebra's perception of the world (and herself) is not as it appears to others, and her narration crackles throughout with wit and absurdity. As she treks across Catalonian Spain, she journeys through books and love affairs and philosophical tousles with Ludo Bembo, her also-displaced Italian foil. Their pattern of romantic coupling and intellectual uncoupling repeats itself; more interesting are Zebra's other exploits-her strange and brilliant interpretations of art, her belief that her mother's soul has been reincarnated inside a cockatoo, and the field-trip group she takes on pilgrimages to famous sites of exile. This is a sharp and genuinely fun picaresque, employing humor and poignancy side-by-side to tell an original and memorable story. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A young woman struggles to make sense of the tragedy of exile, embarking on a series of pilgrimages that may destroy her chance for happiness.Bibi Abbas Abbas Hosseini, the thorny, tragicomic heroine of Van der Vliet Oloomi's (Fra Keeler, 2012, etc.) darkly funny novel, is a narrator who deliberately resists categorization. Raised in Iran during the height of the Iraq War, Bibi fled with her parents, the last survivors of a proud tribe of "Autodidacts, Anarchists, Atheists." Their journey was filled with horrorsdeath, fatigue, and hungerand it haunts her into a fractured adulthood in New York City. Now, more than a decade after fleeing Iran, with her parents both dead, Bibi seeks a new mentor, vocation, and identity. The Zebra, she muses, is "an animal striped black-and-white like a prisoner of war; an animal that rejects all binaries, that represents ink on paper"; it's a name fit for an outsider, and she takes it on. In order to honor her ancestors, Zebra decides to make a "Grand Tour of Exile" through the Old World. She returns to Barcelona, her family's last stop before arriving in the U.S., to confront the intellectual, spiritual, and moral residues of colonialism and capitalism. There she meets Ludo Bembo, an Italian philologist who both repels and intrigues her. Their love affair is tempestuous, ultimately forcing Zebra to confront the way she uses literature to both separate and connect herself to the world and to others. "I am unafraid to admit that the world we live in is violent, obtuse; that a gulf, once opened, is not easily sealed; that one does not drink from the water of death and go on living disaffected, untouched," she thinks near the end of her journey. In knotty prose, Van der Vliet Oloomi both satirizes and embraces a young intellectual's self-absorbed love for her philosophical forbears. The novel is a bombastic homage to the metacriticism of Borges, the Romantic absurdity of Cervantes, and the punk-rock autofictions of Kathy Ackerall figures who loom large in Zebra's mind. As such, it's not easy to pin down the narrative itself, which is less interested in plot than in how Zebra's interior landscape might be projected onto the world. (At times of great sadness and confusion, the storm clouds quite literally roll in.) Perhaps most astonishing is that we get to revel in the intellectual formationand emotional awakeningof a frustrating, complicated, hilarious, and, at times, deliberately annoying heroine whose very capriciousness would prevent her from surfacing in any other novel or under any other writer's care.This is a brilliant, demented, and bizarro book that demands and rewards all the attention a reader might dare to give it. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

GOD SAVE TEXAS: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State, by Lawrence Wright. (Vintage, $16.95.) Wright, a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and longtime resident of the state, explores Texas' foibles, ironies and contradictions with affection. Given the state's booming population and economic growth, Wright's book seems to say, America's future runs through Texas - whether the rest of the country likes it or not. HOW IT HAPPENED, by Michael Koryta. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16.99.) In this murder mystery, Rob Barrett, an interrogation specialist with the F.B.I., is sent to investigate a double homicide that's rattled the town of Port Hope, Me. He believes the confession by a young addict, who directs him to where she says the bodies can be found. But when the details don't seem to pan out, he's kicked off the case. UNEASY PEACE: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, by Patrick Sharkey. (Norton, $16.95.) What's the downside to falling crime rates nationwide? In Sharkey's analysis, what was done to make those rates plunge included increased incarceration rates and violent policing tactics. This book admirably connects the story of how the country became safer with why many communities are wary of the police. A LONG WAY FROM HOME, by Peter Carey. (Vintage, $16.95.) A married couple and their bachelor neighbor set out on a 10,000-mile endurance contest around Australia in the hopes of eventually opening their own auto dealership. Our reviewer, Craig Taylor, praised this shape-shifting, propulsive novel, writing: "With all its inventive momentum, all its pleasurable beats, the fast pace of the race, the scenery unfurling, the novel ends up far from where it started, in a place of historical reckoning and colonial guilt." THE MAKING OF A DREAM: How a Group of Young Undocumented Immigrants Helped Change What It Means to Be American, by Laura Wides-Muñoz. (Harper, $17.99.) WidesMuñoz chronicles the battle for immigration reform through the stories of young activists. A centerpiece of the story is the passage in 2012 of the DACA act, and how it grew out of close to two decades of grass-roots efforts and political activity. CALL ME ZEBRA, by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. (Mariner, $14.99.) In this crackling novel, a bookish Iranian in exile retraces the journey she took with her father, and finds love along the way. As our reviewer, Liesl Schillinger, wrote, the author "relays Zebra's brainy, benighted struggles as a tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bolaño and Borges."