All Strangers are Kin

After seven years studying Arabic and nursing an increasing certainty that she was not only failing to master it but also driving herself crazy, Zora O'Neill let herself off the hook. She stepped away from a language that she found in equal measure fascinating and frustrating. She intended to stay away for good. But as so often happens with our earliest obsessions, Zora just couldn't shake her connection to Arabic and the cultures it opened up to her. Nine years after swearing off that Arabic habit, Zora jumps back in. This time she'll learn Arabic not in sterile classrooms and from silent books, but in the streets of the Middle East and from the regular, fast-talking, dialect-spouting people she will meet there. She embarks on a grand tour through the Middle East--to Egypt, the UAE, Lebanon, and Morocco-- and packs her dictionaries and her unsinkable sense of humor. Along quiet, bougainvillea-lined streets and amid the lively buzz of crowded cities and medinas, she meets an unforgettable cast of characters: Dr. Badawi, enigmatic author of an essential Arabic dictionary; Medo, an exuberant twenty-year-old from Cairo whom she meets online, with questionable driving skills and a wide vocabulary of texting slang; and Houria, a young woman from Rabat who is learning how to live and love on her own terms despite her family and society's demands. At the center of this vibrant portrait is Arabic: the living, breathing language as diverse as its 300 million speakers. O'Neill's experiences create a powerful testament to the dynamism of language and the ways learning another tongue leaves you rich with so much more than words.