Halo of the Moon on Earth Summary
The story follows Palestinian American undergraduate student Hala on a journey that begins in autumn of 2002 when she meets Safeer, a Syrian graduate student with plans to return to his homeland after finishing his degree. Hala falls quickly in love and sees the budding romance as a promising chance at love and a rare opportunity to form a deeper connection to her Middle Eastern origins. In their first two years together, Hala and Safeer endure fraught friendships, judgmental family members, and painful revelations about the past amid the turmoil of post-9/11 America. When the couple gets engaged and relocates to Damascus in 2005, they are hopeful about starting a new chapter there, but tensions soon rise as Safeer’s family meddles in their affairs and Safeer fights for permission to leave the country. The complications create resentment between them and within Safeer's family, leading Hala to question the strength of her commitment to Safeer and her ability to navigate relationships of all kinds. The novel progresses through the years during which the couple's relationship is developing in Arizona—where monsoon winds swirl as personal and political divisiveness grows—and the year they spend together in Syria—where Hala connects with the ancient beauty of the most continuously inhabited city in world history and learns to assert herself regardless of where she is, whose company she keeps, and which visions of the past continue to haunt her.
