Searching for Home

Rizkalla’s vignettes re-create the fragmented nature of childhood memory.

In the tumult of adolescence, a child’s home is often among their few constants. But for 12-year-old Sofia, “home” is as subject to change as her preteen friendships and pubescent feelings. In her debut novel, Hungered, Amanda Rizkalla MFA’23 tells a coming-of-age story set amid economic insecurity, fractured family, and the perpetual pursuit of stability.

For the first 12 years of her life, Sofia’s home was the house she shared with her parents and younger brother, Rafa. After her father’s behavior and betrayal drive her mother to take the children and flee, Sofia’s home is the backseat of their sedan, the library bathrooms where they wash up, the strip-mall parking lots in which they camp overnight, and the stretches of highway they travel in between. Through short, vignette-like chapters, readers witness the innocence of childhood, the familiar frustrations of adolescence, and the trials of homelessness compounded with the racism and classism faced by mother and daughter alike.

“I think the form of the vignette is really conducive to writing through the perspective of a 12-year-old because what makes it into each vignette matters just as much as what is left off the page,” Rizkalla says of the book’s unique format. “I wanted to enact the fractured and episodic nature of memory and attention when people are living through a moment of duress.”

Author Shilpi Somaya Gowda calls Hungered a “heartrending debut” that “never romanticizes hardship, yet finds genuine beauty in small acts of grace and the irrepressible hope of childhood.” Rizkalla was a Kemper-Knapp Fellow at the UW and the 2022–23 Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

Published in the Summer 2026 issue