Where No Shadow Stays by Sara Hashem Book Reviews

Seventeen-year-old Mina is always focused on what comes next: exams, school dances, lakeside picnics with friends. Looking to the future keeps her from dwelling on her past and how little she knows about where she comes from. Anytime she asks her father questions about Egypt—or about her mother’s mysterious death—he closes up.

So, when Mina receives an invitation from an aunt she’s never met to visit the Haikal mansion, her mother’s childhood home in El Agamy, she decides it’s time to find her own answers. Mina travels to Egypt in secret, eager to learn more about her roots and what really happened to her mother.

But when Mina returns from El Agamy, she doesn’t come back alone.

A sinister entity follows Mina from the Haikal mansion to her tiny California town, leaving destruction in its wake as it violently possesses anyone who comes near her. Isolated and fighting for her life, Mina must seek help from an unlikely ally: Jesse Talbot, the town mortician’s hostile son and the only person who proves immune to possession. Brooding Jesse would rather floss with barbed wire than team up with social butterfly Mina, but he doesn’t exactly have a choice—after all, he’s running from family secrets of his own.

As Mina and Jesse dig deeper into Mina’s family lore, they uncover a bloody debt that must be satisfied if Mina wants to finish senior year alive.