A promising title; a 4 star read that dwindled down to a 3.5 at best.  
I gotta admit, this book had me hooked at first, with me voraciously devouring almost 150 pages on the first day and it left me yearning to read more, because I was genuinely anticipating something huge to happen.

It’s tempting to write the review in comparison with Zoulfa’s earlier work : as long as the lemon trees grow, and my weak heart shall give in to that temptation.  
Lemon trees stayed with me for what I believe weeks and months that I ended up gifting it to multiple people. Not that it’s a masterpiece (a 4star for me), but it was moving and it had essence and it stunned and left me sobbing at 2 am.  
In contrast, I started feeling close to nothing reading this book after moving to the second half. To elaborate, I was bracing myself for something that would give meaning to the plot, something deeper. But I reckon the story was written to remain fairly straightforward and easy, but it somehow struggles to get to the deeper layers.

The story is narrated by the protagonist Jihad, who is a Syrian teen (a practicing hijabi) living what would be the most dreadful year of her life in NYC, attending a topnotch school brimming with bigots and racists, always on the run to make things worse for her. We are also introduced to a sweet and gentle boy who’s on the lookout for her, a simmering love story one might expect.  
With the loss of her mother she lost all the colors in her life, literally and metaphorically. She struggles to regain those lost hues while preparing to face life drenched in all its challenges.  
The constant mention of art and how the protagonist vents and expresses her grief, anger, solitude through art resonated with me as I am someone who used to find solace in everything related to art. The descriptions of colors and Jihad’s murals feel utterly vibrant and palpable. I enjoyed those moments thoroughly and I wished there were more of those. The interwoven magical realism gives the story an interesting perspective. I wish the author had explored it a bit more rather than repeating the same “blessings” they had received. The story gradually turns into a somewhat love story along the way, and I was definitely not a huge fan of that pivot.

Personally, the protagonist felt unlikeable to me (personality-wise) for most of the book, but I guess it was meant to make us feel that way..? Maybe. The battles she has to fight - physical and mental- are taxing and she fights them valiantly.  
I will never play down the crimes and discrimination faced by the minorities whether religious or otherwise. I’m sure that every incident narrated in this book has happened to someone at some point, not necessarily just a Muslim person, but anyone from a minority trying to fight for their existence and be seen.  
For the most part, however, I felt as though I was reading a wattpad story (come on, there are genuinely wellwritten books on Wattpad, and no, after is not one of them for me). That said, the prose here is considerably better (struck me as much better than lemon trees’), with a richer vocabulary, stronger sentence structure, and smoother flow.

I won’t say I am hugely disappointed, because I am just going to perceive this story through the lens of a cliche YA novel (and that’s all it is), built around a topic that deserves to be addressed, discussed and brought to light.  
Would I recommend it?, yeah It’s quite a decent read but  definitely not something I’d be gifting someone I guess.

PS: pardon any typos or grammatical errors. English is not my first language:’)

The ocean would paint me blue by Zoulfa Katouh-a much anticipated read that struck me as quite underwhelming