Among nonfiction road trip books, Love Is an Ex-Country is vital for showing how travel in the United States functions very differently depending on what you look like. Jarrar is a fat, queer, Muslim, Arab American who recounts her trip from California to Connecticut in 2016. She encounters hostility, but as a victim of abuse as well as online threats against her life, she knows well how survival mode functions. It’s a brazen book that doles out plentiful laughs along with copious tears.