Author bio: Australian Muslim of Palestinian and Egyptian heritage.
On Rukhsana Khan’s booklist & recommended by Na’ima B. Robert in her piece for the Guardian. Kaye M has mixed feelings about it.
Amal is a typical teenager. She’s interested in hanging out with her friends, clothes and boys. She just also happens to be religious. Before the start of her next school term, she makes the decision to wear the hijab, something which will make her inner convictions much more outwardly evident. This decision is not something she takes lightly. In fact, it’s infused with all the melodrama you might expect from a teenager, plus a thorough (if slightly irrational) pro-con list. In the end, Amal is proud of her decision even though it is not always an easy one.
Amal feels and sounds like a teenager. Sometimes she is just babbling away at full blast about anything and everything. She is at times self-centered and entitled, making decisions based entirely on what she wants, without really considering the feelings of others. And she most certainly embraces drama. She and her friends over-analyze every look, every word, from the boys like like. They go on and on about diet and weight and make-up and clothes. Reading this as an adult, I was sometimes a bit exasperated with her. I felt particularly old when I got annoyed with her! I suspect many teens will get along with her famously.
And despite Amal’s interests in what might seem like shallow or superficial things, she and her friends have more serious conversations as well. They discuss religion and how culture and heritage are sometimes intertwined with religion. They talk about their families and the expectations that are placed upon them. They are strong and bold and often stand up for themselves and their friends. It maybe shouldn’t be a surprise that for the most part, they also have interested and involved parents.
Amal has several Muslim friends, which allows for there to be diversity in how each family celebrates their faith. I’ve read some concerns people have about the depiction of various characters in this book. Some have said that Amal never would have allowed herself to even be alone with a boy, or attend a party where alcohol was present. Others took issue with Leila’s super strict mother who is trying to marry her off at the tender age of 16. It seems like one of main issues people have with this book is whether or not the portrayals of Muslims is realistic. I don’t know that Amal or Leila or Yasmeen or Samantha are typical, they are just themselves. With 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, there are bound to be an innumerable amount of ways to be a Muslim. The other concern seems to be that readers might have a negative impression of Islam, especially in reading about Leila’s family situation. But I think Abdel-Fattah, through the girls’ conversations about their lives manages to do an excellent job of untangling the religious from the cultural. These teens, for all of their interests in superficial things, are thinkers. And they talk about the things that are important to them, which includes their family and their faith. These discussions make it clear how different someone’s upbringing and culture can be from the actual tenets of a religion.
The truth is, I enjoyed this a lot more when I read it the first time, years ago. I feel like my own age and distance from the inherent angst of the teen years made it slightly less enjoyable for me on this reading. I still was impressed with Amal and her ability to grow and change as the book progressed.
Age Recommendation: Grades 8+. This book raises some tricky topics like repeated miscarriage and infertility as well as female circumcision in Africa. Therefore, I’d recommend it only for readers who were of an age to read about and discuss these topics.
Weight and Dieting: This is huge in this book, particularly surrounding Amal’s friend Simone and Amal’s mother. There is a lot of talk of diets and dieting. It’s honest, lots of teens and women do talk about their weight a lot. But it almost made me uncomfortable at times. One of her best friends is a size 14 but always on a diet, including a binge/purge cycle, later she says she tried bulimia but can’t throw up. She wishes she had the discipline to be anorexic. This is reported nearly as a joke. Amal jokes with her friend about weight in a way that seemed a bit mean-spirited although it is clear it wasn’t meant that way. Simone’s mother is also always trying to get her to work out. Another girl complains of being fat even though she’s not, just to get attention. A woman asks her husband if her butt looks big.
Sex, Nudity, Dating – She talks about her period and cramps. She watches Sex and the City and talks about a character on that show picking up a guy. Guys at her school talk about pornos and think breast implants should be a civic duty. She likes a boy. A boy is not the “just-wants-to-bonk-girls type”. A girl fantasizes about cuddling with a boy. A teenage friend of Amal’s is being pressured to marry young. She reads Cosmo which her mother says is about sex. She read a sealed section of that magazine on male body parts. She and her mother had a sex talk (not described). Amal wants to kiss a boy. She talks about how she can’t do the boyfriend-girlfriend thing, that she doesn’t believe in sex or physical intimacy before marriage. One girl says that “everybody” thinks it’s normal to lose your virginity to somebody you speak to once at a party. Amal’s cousin had her hands all over a guy at a bar. An adult couple remembers when they were younger and kissed in public. A woman was unable to have more kids. Older women are described as having heaving breasts. This description is not referring to anything sexual. Graffiti says that a girl “gives it to the football team”. A girl comments that the news is saying that some girls were raped by Muslims. A girl has read an article about girls being circumcised and asks Amal if she is “whole down there”. It is done maliciously. A woman was married at 14, but says she and her husband weren’t really being husband and wife until she was 16. Her husband was 12 years older than she was. There’s a lot of analyzing whether or not people like each other romantically. A girl takes off her shirt and dances on a table. A couple holds hands. A guy jokes that his friend is trying to get a girl into the sack. There’s a lot of discussion about the pros and cons of physical intimacy before marriage. A guy tries to kiss a girl. A girl wears a shirt that has half her boobs hanging out. A guy tries to dance dirty with a girl in a club. A guy makes a slut joke about a girl. Some teens at a women’s shelter are pregnant. A girl and her date kiss. A girl blows a kiss to a guy.
Profanity – “bi-yotch”, she is called a “darkie” and a “towel head”, “crap”, “shove it”, “smartass”, “Oh my God”, “hell”, “moron”, “for God’s sake”, pissed off”, the parents talk about how they would curse in foreign languages and no one would know what they were saying, “Damn”, “jerk”, “bull crap”, “Jesus Christ”, a woman swears in Greek (the words are not printed), “bitch”, “shut up”, “dork”, “lame”,
Death, Violence and Gore – In the past, someone was killed in a hit and run. Some people think all white people are wife bashers. There are references to September 11. A woman had 3 miscarriages. She says the babies died in her stomach. A miscarriage is described, just the bleeding and the sorrow, nothing more graphic. A boy jokes about a roller coaster accident resulting in guts and entrails being strewn about. No such accident occurred. A girl shoves another girl down. The news reports a nightclub bombing in Bali. There’s a mention of people being turned into carcasses by the bombs. Amal spends time thinking about who might have died. At a shelter, women are there because they have been beaten and/or raped or molested.
Drugs, Alcohol and Smoking – The general public thinks you should get drunk. A cousin of Amal’s smokes. A cousin of Amal’s drinks. An adult smokes tobacco in a water pipe. A boy got caught smoking pot and his father just told him not to go overboard with it. An adult drinks sherry. Some people think whites are drunks. There’s some discussion about how drinking is acceptable socially among teens but being religious is not. An adult is offered beer. A girl’s older brother drinks and smokes weeded. She asks if he was “wasted”. A woman smokes a cigarette. A teenager throws a party with alcohol. A teen starts smoking hoping it will help her lose weight. Other teens smoke. A girl’s father smokes. Some of the people at the shelter are “druggies”.
Frightening or Intense Things – A teen runs away. She spends time at a shelter.
