'The Skin and Its Girl' ponders truths, half-truths, and lies passed down in families

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/26/ [login to see] /book-review-sarah-cypher-debut-novel-the-skin-and-its-girl
There is a particular magic to stories about storytelling, especially when they use the metafictional element to probe into the very nature of reality and how we live inside of it.

Sarah Cypher's debut novel The Skin and Its Girl is one of these, specifically dealing in the truths, half-truths, lies, and folktales passed down through family. It begins with a fitting request: "Imagine this."

Elspeth Rummani, sometimes called Betty, is the book's narrator, and her narrative takes the form of a series of stories, memories, and speculations that she shares at the grave of her great-aunt Nuha. Even though she knows Nuha is dead, communing with the woman and her tall tales and metaphoric fictions is a way for Betty to come to a decision about whether or not she will choose to exile herself from the United States, the only home she's ever really known, and join her lover in another country.

In order to properly make sense of her own life and the choice before her, Betty must start at the very beginning — at least, at her very beginning, the day of her birth, her death, and her miracle. Born with the umbilical cord around her neck, she is pronounced dead, only to spontaneously return to life with one minor eccentricity, which is that her skin is "an even, lustrous blue like a creature from a fairy tale." There is no explanation for her color, no apparent abnormality in her vital signs; she's just recently dead, newly alive, and blue.