In Daughters of Palestine, Reverend Canon Leyla K. King brings readers a perspective that has been virtually absent in contemporary discussion of Palestine: that of generations of Christian Palestinian women. A Palestinian American Episcopal priest in the Diocese of West Texas, King comes from a long line of Anglican worshipers. This slim book of stories interweaves first-person narratives from the perspectives of three Christian women – Leyla herself, her grandmother, Bahi, and her great-grandmother, Aniisah – along with family stories written in the third person.

As King shifts between vividly characterized perspectives, we fall into patterns of repetition with a difference; these beautifully crafted stories resonate across generations of marriages, births, struggles with parenting, deaths, displacements, and faith. The result is a propulsive read. Daughters of Palestine follows the women in King’s family from Haifa to Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, New York, London, Paris, and Houston. They face the precarities of being Christians in Muslim-majority nations and of being Palestinian among populations resentful of refugees displaced from the new state of Israel. The privileges of education and well-positioned friends and colleagues only partially enable them to evade the traumas of war in their pursuit of peace and freedom.

Whether describing times of safety or upheaval, King’s narration is saturated with the language of the Anglican liturgy and stories from the Bible. We hear these women affirm what “is meet and right so to do” and reference their homeland as a place of biblical import, such as Mount Carmel, where King’s grandfather built a home to which they would never return, or Lake Tiberius, “where Jesus walked on the water,” as the site of a church picnic. These turns of phrase suffuse King’s family’s natural cadence, and they also often dramatically subvert common American conceptions of Palestinians. In one passage describing Bahi’s family’s 1949 flight from Beirut to Damascus – one of many dislocations she experienced – the first-person narrator likens the “walls” of snow bordering the mountain roads to “the water walls of the Red Sea when the Israelites escaped slavery in Egypt.” By invoking the Jewish Exodus story to make sense of her own suffering, ironically precipitated by the modern Israeli nation-state, King’s narrative challenges American Christians to consider how ethnic and racial prejudices might limit the liberation narratives they are willing to embrace.

While King’s afterword mentions the “threat of genocide” facing Palestinians in Gaza as a significant impetus for writing her book, the political significance of her family’s experience emerges only gradually through the narrative and is never the central focus. But of course, telling the everyday human stories of Palestinians is unavoidably political. The crucial but difficult questions King raises are ones she herself admittedly only learned to ask as a near-adult. This book provides a pivotal resource for Christians who seek justice, mercy, and humility in their congregations.