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adiya's review
dark
emotional
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
Trigger warnings:
Sexual Assault — Rape — Child abuse (physical abuse) — Death — Bullying — Domestic Violence — Graphic Car Accident — Death of a pet — Depression — Islamophobia
Now, that I have mentioned these trigger warnings, I want to clear myself for the family members who follow me here. I bought this book for its cover, it's a pretty cover, please don't snitch this to my Abba, I don't normally read such kind of books. And honestly I am sick of you, you know who you are.
Now the plot got me hooked, like I completed this book in three days. The biggest unexpected turn for me was that there was this Indian Hindu girl who became a bar dancer to support her younger sister and latter had an illegitimate child with a gangster and then they both died but instead of focusing on them, the story is basically is about their daughter, Zarin Wadia. Who was a 16 year-old Zoroastrian from Mumbai, living in Jeddah with her aunt and uncle. After you know, her parents went k-bomb. Her aunt used to hate her mother because of her profession and her marriage and blames Zarin for everything. Her aunt is mentally ill and her uncle doesn't try to protect her. Due to endless tortures abuse inflicted at her home, Zarin become rebellious. She began to date boys and started smoking. Now all the characters were exceptionally well written, except maybe Porus. I’m amazed at how in such a small book the author manages to seamlessly squeeze in numerous flashbacks that paint a complete picture of everyone’s life.
Also this book is the closest I've found relatable with my highschool experience. Well, not the smoking and boys part, certainly not being Zoroastrian part, but the ways of talking and subtle gestures made this really relatable. Talking about someone behind their back, calling them names, snickering at them behind the books and hands, giving them cool stares, was all too common in my highschool too. Sometimes, shamefully I've been a part of this too. This book also discusses rape culture and double standards that are so deeply ingraved in our society. I am really glad the author mentioned the example of uncovered and covered lollipops that some people givesin comparison to veiled and unveiled women. That's the most disgusting way women can be objectified. But she didn't do anything against, or the characters, characters just sort of accept everything thrown in their way in this.
Seriously, I would've really loved this book, this could've been my favourite feminist book of the year but it lost it by being Islamophobic, I mean at first you won't notice this and that's what makes this subtle Islamophobia so scary. And to see why I'm naming this book as Islamophobic let’s move on to the actual Muslim characters portrayed in the novel, shall we?! The main Muslim characters you see throughout the novel are 1) Mishal’s family and 2) Farhan’s family. And as far as fucked up representations go, these two really makes the home run.
The two Muslim families closest to the heart of the story. In one, you’ve got a man who abandoned his first wife for a second, because polygamy is a totally common and normal thing (spoiler: it’s not). You have Mishal, a sixteen-year-old girl whose marriage prospects are “limited to creepy grooms nearly twice or thrice [her] age.” (spoiler: this is also not common, despite what every wonderful portrayal of the middle east would have you think). Mishal, whose brother tells her, after his friend attempts to assault her, “Have you learned nothing about men and the necessity of a proper hijab? Or did you want his attention?”. A brother who says that “A woman’s honor is like a tightly wrapped sweet. If you unwrap a sweet and leave it lying around, you expose it to everything out there. If, by accident, it falls into the dirt – tell me, Mishal, will anyone want to eat it?” Mishal, who lives in a society that believes that sex is something that a girl should “[suffer] through like a proper virgin.” (spoiler: also not true). All this, while Abdullah reads porn magazines, smokes, dates multiple girls, and Mishal the prude watches, scandalized. Not to mention the fact that since their father moved out to live with his new wife, he’s legally the “guardian of the household” and this is something that’s not questioned, even once, by anyone. What a great, wonderful, functional family, right? What a fantastically positive portrayal. But it gets worse.
Farhan’s family is where things start to get properly disgusting. How is it first introduced? Here are the actual first lines of Farhan’s point of view in the entire book, no joke: “They were going at it like dogs, Abba and the maid. My father, who my mother said I would look like when I got older – tall, dark, and handsome – banging the maid so hard that he banged the headboard against the wall and left a mark in the paint.” Yeah, a great start, isn’t it? So aside from a cheating father (because the only two Muslim fathers portrayed in the novel have to be these disgusting men who can’t possibly have a healthy relationship with a single wife, it’s impossible), you have the disgustingness that is Farhan himself. Farhan, who’s most renowned as being the school heartthrob. But unlike your usual YA contemporary heartthrob, because all these characters are Muslim, and thus must be degenerate somehow, right, this one drugs girls to get with them, sexually assaults them, and rapes them. On a regular basis. How wonderful, right?
Also there was this very distrubing scene of Farhan with the head girl in his car where he likes describes that after doing his business with her, her clothes were all misplaced except her hijab, not a single strand of hair so out of it. Like how disgusting this boy is.
There’s a lot more I could go into, honestly – the astonishing relationship between Zarin and her aunt (who started shaming her niece at the age of four for “spreading her legs and sitting like a boy”), the slut-shaming rampant throughout the whole book, the idea that a girl has to bleed when she loses her virginity, the inevitability of arranged marriage for not only Mishal but all the female characters, the objectification of girls for their boobs (seriously, there is a concerning hyperfixation on boobs for some reason, you’d think this was written by a white man because this is almost titting down stairs level boobery), a debate that only seems to show domestic abuse as normalized in this society, and more. Like the school teachers are just in mid lecture, giving examples of good girls and bad girls. Like WTF
I could've liked this book, it was dark and everything but in this book, every other muslim was badly potrayed. It's not suppose to be a happy book, and all characters were really complex, but there wasn't a single good, sane muslim here. Only good character was Porus, and, he was just way too good.
I can hardly begin to explain how damaging something like this is – a book that’s being lauded as this brave exposure of misogyny and rape culture, but is written in such bad taste. The context of this book makes the whole discussion fraught with damaging implications, and the lack of any good, or positive, or normal characters in the whole book to counterbalance all the shitty ones is really inexcusable.
In conclusion, DON'T JUDGE A BOOK BY IT'S COVER. The story is moving and catchy and fast paced but read only if you are comfortable with all these warnings I mentioned and beware of the hidden Islamophobia it contains.
Sexual Assault — Rape — Child abuse (physical abuse) — Death — Bullying — Domestic Violence — Graphic Car Accident — Death of a pet — Depression — Islamophobia
Now, that I have mentioned these trigger warnings, I want to clear myself for the family members who follow me here. I bought this book for its cover, it's a pretty cover, please don't snitch this to my Abba, I don't normally read such kind of books. And honestly I am sick of you, you know who you are.
Now the plot got me hooked, like I completed this book in three days. The biggest unexpected turn for me was that there was this Indian Hindu girl who became a bar dancer to support her younger sister and latter had an illegitimate child with a gangster and then they both died but instead of focusing on them, the story is basically is about their daughter, Zarin Wadia. Who was a 16 year-old Zoroastrian from Mumbai, living in Jeddah with her aunt and uncle. After you know, her parents went k-bomb. Her aunt used to hate her mother because of her profession and her marriage and blames Zarin for everything. Her aunt is mentally ill and her uncle doesn't try to protect her. Due to endless tortures abuse inflicted at her home, Zarin become rebellious. She began to date boys and started smoking. Now all the characters were exceptionally well written, except maybe Porus. I’m amazed at how in such a small book the author manages to seamlessly squeeze in numerous flashbacks that paint a complete picture of everyone’s life.
Also this book is the closest I've found relatable with my highschool experience. Well, not the smoking and boys part, certainly not being Zoroastrian part, but the ways of talking and subtle gestures made this really relatable. Talking about someone behind their back, calling them names, snickering at them behind the books and hands, giving them cool stares, was all too common in my highschool too. Sometimes, shamefully I've been a part of this too. This book also discusses rape culture and double standards that are so deeply ingraved in our society. I am really glad the author mentioned the example of uncovered and covered lollipops that some people givesin comparison to veiled and unveiled women. That's the most disgusting way women can be objectified. But she didn't do anything against, or the characters, characters just sort of accept everything thrown in their way in this.
Seriously, I would've really loved this book, this could've been my favourite feminist book of the year but it lost it by being Islamophobic, I mean at first you won't notice this and that's what makes this subtle Islamophobia so scary. And to see why I'm naming this book as Islamophobic let’s move on to the actual Muslim characters portrayed in the novel, shall we?! The main Muslim characters you see throughout the novel are 1) Mishal’s family and 2) Farhan’s family. And as far as fucked up representations go, these two really makes the home run.
The two Muslim families closest to the heart of the story. In one, you’ve got a man who abandoned his first wife for a second, because polygamy is a totally common and normal thing (spoiler: it’s not). You have Mishal, a sixteen-year-old girl whose marriage prospects are “limited to creepy grooms nearly twice or thrice [her] age.” (spoiler: this is also not common, despite what every wonderful portrayal of the middle east would have you think). Mishal, whose brother tells her, after his friend attempts to assault her, “Have you learned nothing about men and the necessity of a proper hijab? Or did you want his attention?”. A brother who says that “A woman’s honor is like a tightly wrapped sweet. If you unwrap a sweet and leave it lying around, you expose it to everything out there. If, by accident, it falls into the dirt – tell me, Mishal, will anyone want to eat it?” Mishal, who lives in a society that believes that sex is something that a girl should “[suffer] through like a proper virgin.” (spoiler: also not true). All this, while Abdullah reads porn magazines, smokes, dates multiple girls, and Mishal the prude watches, scandalized. Not to mention the fact that since their father moved out to live with his new wife, he’s legally the “guardian of the household” and this is something that’s not questioned, even once, by anyone. What a great, wonderful, functional family, right? What a fantastically positive portrayal. But it gets worse.
Farhan’s family is where things start to get properly disgusting. How is it first introduced? Here are the actual first lines of Farhan’s point of view in the entire book, no joke: “They were going at it like dogs, Abba and the maid. My father, who my mother said I would look like when I got older – tall, dark, and handsome – banging the maid so hard that he banged the headboard against the wall and left a mark in the paint.” Yeah, a great start, isn’t it? So aside from a cheating father (because the only two Muslim fathers portrayed in the novel have to be these disgusting men who can’t possibly have a healthy relationship with a single wife, it’s impossible), you have the disgustingness that is Farhan himself. Farhan, who’s most renowned as being the school heartthrob. But unlike your usual YA contemporary heartthrob, because all these characters are Muslim, and thus must be degenerate somehow, right, this one drugs girls to get with them, sexually assaults them, and rapes them. On a regular basis. How wonderful, right?
Also there was this very distrubing scene of Farhan with the head girl in his car where he likes describes that after doing his business with her, her clothes were all misplaced except her hijab, not a single strand of hair so out of it. Like how disgusting this boy is.
There’s a lot more I could go into, honestly – the astonishing relationship between Zarin and her aunt (who started shaming her niece at the age of four for “spreading her legs and sitting like a boy”), the slut-shaming rampant throughout the whole book, the idea that a girl has to bleed when she loses her virginity, the inevitability of arranged marriage for not only Mishal but all the female characters, the objectification of girls for their boobs (seriously, there is a concerning hyperfixation on boobs for some reason, you’d think this was written by a white man because this is almost titting down stairs level boobery), a debate that only seems to show domestic abuse as normalized in this society, and more. Like the school teachers are just in mid lecture, giving examples of good girls and bad girls. Like WTF
I could've liked this book, it was dark and everything but in this book, every other muslim was badly potrayed. It's not suppose to be a happy book, and all characters were really complex, but there wasn't a single good, sane muslim here. Only good character was Porus, and, he was just way too good.
I can hardly begin to explain how damaging something like this is – a book that’s being lauded as this brave exposure of misogyny and rape culture, but is written in such bad taste. The context of this book makes the whole discussion fraught with damaging implications, and the lack of any good, or positive, or normal characters in the whole book to counterbalance all the shitty ones is really inexcusable.
In conclusion, DON'T JUDGE A BOOK BY IT'S COVER. The story is moving and catchy and fast paced but read only if you are comfortable with all these warnings I mentioned and beware of the hidden Islamophobia it contains.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Body shaming, Bullying, Car accident, Child abuse, Death, Death of parent, Domestic abuse, Drug use, Drug abuse, Islamophobia, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexism, Sexual content, Sexual harassment, and Sexual violence
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