A Reader Is Me!

Title: Does My Head Look Big in This?
Author: Randa Abdel-Fattah
Number of Pages: 360 pages
Book Number/Goal: 57/75 for 2009
My Rating: 3.5/5

Amal is a sixteen-year-old Palestinian-Australian girl attending a mostly-white prep school. When the new semester starts, she decides she wants to wear the hijab full-time, even though she knows she's just letting herself in for even more harrassment from her clueless classmates.

This is a cute story. It seems like a pretty typical YA chick-lit story. The girls are all very girly and into fashion and makeup and boys, and there's boy trouble and mean girls screaming at parents who Just Don't Understand and all that sort of thing. But it's nice to see that sort of story with a Muslim protagonist.

I really liked that she wasn't the only Muslim in the story, either. She wasn't standing in for all Muslim women; there were her family members, her friends Yasmeen and Leila and their families, and mentions of the kids at the Islamic school Amal used to go to.

Reading this felt almost as nostalgic as Alex Sanchez's The God Box did. Even though I was raised in a conservative Christian family, not Muslim, a lot of what Amal said felt very familiar (I was never personally religious the way she is, but I certainly knew many people who were/are).

The writing isn't that great. I'm really over this first-person info-dump thing that seems to be so popular. I don't mind first-person narration, but it's possible to tell a story without first giving me a whole chapter about the narrator's life story, really.

Mooch from BookMooch.

Title: The Taqwacores
Author: Michael Muhammad Knight
Number of Pages: 256 pages
Book Number/Goal: 19/75 for 2009
My Rating: 5/5

Review: Yusef's parents didn't want him living in the dorms, so he rooms in a house with a bunch of other Muslims. But what his parents don't know is that these Muslims include a burqa-wearing feminist, a drunk, and a pothead, and even the most "traditional" member of the group is a punk kid covered in tattoos.

This is basically the story of how Yusef's faith changes over the course of his time living there, and despite the fact that it's specifically about a Muslim guy, the story resonated with me coming from a Christian background as well.

The book assumes an audience of Muslims, so there are a lot of Arabic terms thrown around with no explanation, but I found it easy enough to follow despite that. (And I liked that you're just thrown into that and everything isn't explained.)

Although the author is white (he converted to Islam as a teenager), the characters are almost all people of color (there's one minor character who's white), mostly East and Southeast Asians. I really loved the characters, especially Rabeya and Jehangir.

It's also being made into a movie, which I'm really excited about.