Homecoming

By Angélique Jamail

Raqia, a teenage girl who immigrated to Texas from Lebanon as a toddler, has felt the subtle pang of loneliness most of her life: she has no siblings, and her widowed father stayed behind when Raqia and her grandmother left Beirut to escape dangerous wolf packs terrorizing the city.
These wolves were not just animals, however. They were also people.
Homecoming is set in a present-day world where one's Animal Affinity emerges, usually during adolescence, to signal one's burgeoning into adulthood.
Raqia and her two best friends, Anabelle and Eddie, navigate homecoming at their high school while the threatening undercurrent of wolf packs encroaches around their city. Complicating all of this are two things: first, charismatic Eddie himself is a wolf––though not, he claims, associated with one of the gangs engaging in violent criminal behavior; second, Anabelle’s emotional swings grow more wild as one of the girls begins to evince her Animal Affinity. The balance between this trio––and the friendships which matter in Raqia’s life––are on the cusp of an irrevocable shift.

“A fantastical looking glass on the modern world and the timeless hurdles of growing up.”
— Seth Skorkowsky, author of Ashes of Onyx and Dämoren

“With Finis. and now Homecoming, Jamail has created a rich, nuanced world in which the line between human and animal is blurred. The lines demarcating which is which are often used by people to put others in their place. And with a sharp irony, the monstrosity of those with their Animal Affinities is most shown in how they choose to treat their Plain friends and family — that is, by the very human choices they make, not the animal instincts that infuse their characters. These are beautifully written, poignant, and often funny stories, which fans of both the speculative and the literary will enjoy immersing themselves in.”
— David Jón Fuller, contributing author to Parallel Prairies, On Spec, Tesseracts

• Language: English
• Publisher: Angélique Jamail
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781732862951

Angélique Jamail

Angélique Jamail’s poetry and essays have appeared in over two dozen anthologies and journals, including New Reader Magazine, Waxwing, Time-Slice, Improbable Worlds, Pluck Magazine, The Milk of Female Kindness––An Anthology of Honest Motherhood, Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston, Femmeliterate, Bayou City Magazine, and The Enchantment of the Ordinary. Her work was selected as a Finalist for the New Letters Prize in Poetry in 2011. Her magic realism novelette Finis. (Odeon Press) has been praised by fiction writer Ari Marmell as having “some of the most real people I’ve encountered via text in a long time,” and by poet Marie Marshall as “a witty tale of conformity, prejudice, and transformation, in a world that is disturbing as much for its familiarity as for its strangeness.” She teaches Creative Writing and English in Houston. Find her online at her blog Sappho’s Torque (www.SapphosTorque.com).

Book preview

Homecoming

Angélique Jamail

Raqia, a teenage girl who immigrated to Texas from Lebanon as a toddler, has felt the subtle pang of loneliness most of her life: she has no siblings, and her widowed father stayed behind when Raqia and her grandmother left Beirut to escape dangerous wolf packs terrorizing the city.

These wolves were not just animals, however. They were also people.

Homecoming is set in a present-day world where one's Animal Affinity emerges, usually during adolescence, to signal one's burgeoning into adulthood.

Raqia and her two best friends, Anabelle and Eddie, navigate homecoming at their high school while the threatening undercurrent of wolf packs encroaches around their city. Complicating all of this are two things: first, charismatic Eddie himself is a wolf––though not, he claims, associated with one of the gangs engaging in violent criminal behavior; second, Anabelle’s emotional swings grow more wild as one of the girls begins to evince her Animal Affinity. The balance between this trio––and the friendships which matter in Raqia’s life––are on the cusp of an irrevocable shift.

A fantastical looking glass on the modern world and the timeless hurdles of growing up.

— Seth Skorkowsky, author of Ashes of Onyx and Dämoren

category: Fiction

publisher: Odeon Press

price: $5.99

ISBN: 978-1-7328629-5-1

also by Angélique Jamail

Animal Affinities series:

Finis.

Poetry:

The Sharp Edges of Water

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Homecoming

A fantastical looking glass on the modern world and the timeless hurdles of growing up.

— Seth Skorkowsky, author of Ashes of Onyx and Dämoren

"With Finis. and now Homecoming, Jamail has created a rich, nuanced world in which the line between human and animal is blurred. The lines demarcating which is which are often used by people to put others in their place. And with a sharp irony, the monstrosity of those with their Animal Affinities is most shown in how they choose to treat their Plain friends and family — that is, by the very human choices they make, not the animal instincts that infuse their characters. These are beautifully written, poignant, and often funny stories, which fans of both the speculative and the literary will enjoy immersing themselves in."

— David Jón Fuller, contributing author to Parallel Prairies, On Spec, Tesseracts

PRAISE FOR Finis.

It’s not often I get that viscerally emotional on behalf of a fictional character. In a setting of overt fantasy, Angélique Jamail has created some of the most real people I’ve encountered via text in a long time.

– Ari Marmell, author of Hot Lead, Cold Iron and The Widdershins Series

"A silver vein of irony runs through Angélique Jamail’s fantastic Finis. It is a witty tale of conformity, prejudice, and transformation, in a world that is disturbing as much for its familiarity as for its strangeness. In a place where everyone is different, Elsa is the wrong kind of different, and that means facing pity, discrimination, danger, and sharp teeth. Dive into this story, readers, and confront them for yourself; it may just change the way you feel about things…"

– Marie Marshall, author of The Everywhen Angels and I am not a fish

PRAISE FOR The Sharp Edges of Water

For Jamail, loss is the fecund territory complicated by the travails of geographic movement, emotional upheaval, and cultural dissonance and where the poetry sings its best.

– Sarah Cortez, editor and contributor, Vanishing Points: Poems and Photographs of Texas Roadside Memorials

"The Sharp Edges of Water is a collection of superbly crafted poems…poems of faith and freeways, of lies and longing. Angélique sees the details of Los Angeles and love, with a necessity of details we locals have forgotten. As the title implies, you might get wet reading them. Wear appropriate clothing."

– Rick Lupert, author of Beautiful Mistakes and God Wrestler, creator of www.PoetrySuperHighway.com

The poems trace a journey of memories built over time, a demonstration of how the mythic unconscious of our childhood maps onto the fragile desires of our bursting bodies. The poems prick open the hard shell of indifference, or endurance, that thick rind the above-world forms on us with all the wounds and cuts and losses of the sharp edges we stumble through and away from.

– Misty Urban, review at Femmeliterate

Homecoming

Book 2 of the Animal Affinities Series

Angélique Jamail

Odeon Press

This story is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental and/or fictitious.

Homecoming. Copyright 2020 by Angélique Jamail. All rights reserved. Produced in the United States of America.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author except in fair use cases of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or essays and reviews. For more information about Angélique Jamail and her work, or to contact the author, please visit www.SapphosTorque.com or www.AngeliqueJamail.com.

Published by Odeon Press.

www.odeonpress.com

ISBN 978-1-7328629-5-1

Edited by Jayne Pillemer.

Cover and interior graphic design by Lauren Volness.

Book formatting by Jesse Gordon.

for my own Taita (1922-2001):

I’m so grateful to have her recipes

and for the hours I spent learning to cook with her

for Aaron:

because every book I write is also for you

for everyone else who needs to read this:

I see you

You matter

You are necessary

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Acknowledgements

Book Group Discussion Guide

Respect

Ways to Support Authors

About the Author

Author’s Note

While most of the names in this book are going to be very easy to pronounce, there are two I want to give a quick guide for because they are Arabic names and might not seem to necessarily follow the usual English conventions for pronunciation.

Raqia should sound like RAH-kee-uh. It is widely considered a Muslim name with Urdu origins, but there are certainly women with this name who don’t identify with either Islam or Urdu.

Taita should sound like