THE MUEZZIN

A heartfelt, humane story about voice and displacement that occasionally sounds a flat note. In Hart’s novel, a pop star’s hidden past as a girl who defied a theocracy by chanting the call to prayer catches up with her onstage. Louna, a rising pop star on her first stadium tour in Marseille, is a famous face hiding a buried identity. Backstage after her set, an intruder startles her with words in Arabic: “I found you, Jamila”—revealing by the use of her birth name that someone from her past has tracked her down. Ten years earlier, Jamila was a 13-year-old girl living with her twin brother, Ali, their traumatized mother, Amina, and their grandfather, Osama—a former Alnizam general, town surgeon, and hereditary muezzin—in a country just emerging from civil war. Forbidden as a girl from performing the call to prayer, Jamila secretly disguises herself as Ali and delivers the Fajr adhan twice, aided by Jamal, the mosque’s blind caretaker, who frames her act as quiet defiance (“They want you to fade into the background, to cover yourself, to become part of the supporting cast. Nothing more than a slave. So recite it, but make sure you do it just as you did last time. No need to be reckle...