Headscratchers / The Familiar

• Help with all the untranslated foreign languages in the books?
  • See the Annotations on Wikia, that will explain a lot.

• How to read this daunting and confusing-appearing series?
  • Just read Volume 1 cover-to-cover first (best accompanied by the Wikia Annotations, and optionally the Wikipedia synopsis and / or the Wikia synopsis). Then re-read it narrator-for-narrator, i.e. first read all of [Narrator X]'s chapters, then all of [the next Narrator]. Since each narrator has such a different narrative style and vocabulary, it's easier to follow each narrator's style once you got the hang of it. If you tackle Volume 1 this way, the following Volumes should be easy and simple to read in one time.

• It makes no sense the Ibrahims have moved house around the U.S. just about every year for the last decade. Astair is in university and it is specifically mentioned how their continually moving around has delayed her graduating (she's been at it for 9 years, IIRC). More importantly, Anwar, the only breadwinner, is a computer programmer, a job that relatively is one of the easiest to do long-distance / at home, so they probably weren't moving for his job. What were they moving around for? It is slightly hinted that Xanther's being bullied at all her schools is the cause, but that doesn't seem like a satisfactory explanation to me; Anwar and Astair seem to be intelligent and outspoken enough people (she's even a therapist) to know that switching schools a dozen times isn't the solution to your child being bullied. So why? Though maybe over the course of the coming books we'll find out why the Ibrahims were constantly moving and the reason will give them a more DarkAndTroubledPast than they have now.