In the magic my body becomes, Jess Rizkallah seeks a vernacular for the inescapable middle ground of being Arab American--a space that she finds, at times, to be too Arab for America and too American for her Lebanese elders.

The voice here freely asserts gender, sexuality, and religious beliefs, while at the same time it respects a generational divide: the younger's privilege gained by the sacrifice of the older, the impossibility of separating what is wholly hers from what is hers second-hand.

In exploring family history,...