This Way Back

<p><strong>"Winning and contemplative." --<em>Kirkus Reviews</em> (starred review) </strong></p><p>Going back to her ancestral homeland a Greek American girl discovers she is a lesbian in love with God so her questions about home and belonging will not be easily answered.</p><p><em>This Way Back </em>dramatizes a childhood split between Queens New York and Cyprus an island nation with a long colonial history and a culture to which Joanna Eleftheriou could never quite adjust. The book avows a Greek-Cypriot-American lesbian's existence by documenting its scenes: reenacting an 1829 mass suicide by jumping off a school stage onto gym mats at St. Nicholas harvesting carobs on ancestral land purchasing UNESCO-protected lace marching in the island's first gay pride parade visiting Cyprus's occupied north against a dying father's wish and pruning geraniums cypress trees and jasmine after her father grew too weak to lift the shears. While the author's life binds the essays in <em>This Way Back </em>into what reads like a memoir the book questions memoir's conventional boundaries between the individual and her community and between political and personal loss the human and the environment and the living and the dead.</p>