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A review by agarje1
The Royal Abduls by Ramiza Shamoun Koya
4.0
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a review copy
I also posted this review on my book blog:
Ramiza Shamoun Koya’s debut novel is an emotional portrayal of a Hyderabadi American Muslim family and the struggles they face in post-9/11 America. The characters are lovingly drawn, and the conflicts they deal with never felt inorganic. The story is primarily told from the perspectives of Amina and her nephew Omar.
Amina is a post-doc in Biology who has recently taken up a new post in Washington, D.C., the city where her brother lives. Through Amina, we get an insight into how insidious sexism in the workplace manifests itself. This is especially evident with Amina’s colleague Anjali and her too-friendly relationship with their boss Chris. Amina herself feels like she is in a rut, having just left a long-term relationship and not really in love with her new job. As someone looking to pursue biology at a Master’s level, I must say that Amina’s experience with her position was not encouraging to me. But I applaud the author for not sugarcoating anything, but still giving us a sense of how Amina first fell in love with biology and her continued love of field work.
Omar is the son of Amina’s brother Mo and his white wife Marcy. The family is fairly disconnected from their Hyderabadi roots, but because Omar is perceived by others to be Indian and/or Muslim depending on the situation, he naturally comes to have an identity crisis. I felt the author’s portrayal of Omar to really capture what it is like to feel lost at such a young age. With his parents caught up in their own problems and a huge gap in his knowledge of his family history, Omar begins to turn to Amina for guidance. But Amina’s own issues with commitment make her somewhat unreliable for him.
Throughout this, the realities of being Muslim in 2000s America, or really just having Muslim names, blows out of proportion situations that should have been brushed off. An incident with a knife ends up having undue consequences for Omar, and the author clearly shows the Islamophobia in the punishment and the bullying that led Omar to it. The author also did a great job of portraying how Omar’s disconnect with his Muslim and Indian heritage leads him to being more confused about how people treat him. He is trying to come to understand what it means to be perceived as Muslim even when he is not religious and has no one to guide him. The novel’s last section is set in India, and without going into too much detail, I was relieved that the author deftly portrayed the differences and similarities between the character’s life in India and the US. The threat of a majoritarian government has yet to come into fruition in India, but the author clearly shows how othering it is to be perceived as Muslim even there. India is not the homecoming the character may have thought it would be, but it still represents an important stage in the character’s development.
The author’s choices when it came to presenting the family’s culture and various elements of desi culture was thought provoking. For one thing, it is unusual to see a Hyderabadi Muslim family claim Hindi as their ancestral language. But I thought it was a bold choice to have the characters state misconceptions about different aspects of desi culture because they genuinely believed them. Omar, for example, believes initially that Hindus are more Indian than Muslims. Amina at one point gives a definition of desi to mean being of Indian heritage, when the term applies to some other South Asians as well. For a desi reader like myself it was easier to parse out the misconceptions from what was actually true, but it could lead to some non-desi readers believing these misconceptions.
Despite a somewhat unorganized start, I found that this novel built up emotion very well, so that by the end I was absolutely gripped by these characters’ stories. This portrait of a family struggling to stay together was incredibly moving. This is a book that skillfully balances heartwarming lighter moments with heartbreaking darker ones.
I also posted this review on my book blog:
Ramiza Shamoun Koya’s debut novel is an emotional portrayal of a Hyderabadi American Muslim family and the struggles they face in post-9/11 America. The characters are lovingly drawn, and the conflicts they deal with never felt inorganic. The story is primarily told from the perspectives of Amina and her nephew Omar.
Amina is a post-doc in Biology who has recently taken up a new post in Washington, D.C., the city where her brother lives. Through Amina, we get an insight into how insidious sexism in the workplace manifests itself. This is especially evident with Amina’s colleague Anjali and her too-friendly relationship with their boss Chris. Amina herself feels like she is in a rut, having just left a long-term relationship and not really in love with her new job. As someone looking to pursue biology at a Master’s level, I must say that Amina’s experience with her position was not encouraging to me. But I applaud the author for not sugarcoating anything, but still giving us a sense of how Amina first fell in love with biology and her continued love of field work.
Omar is the son of Amina’s brother Mo and his white wife Marcy. The family is fairly disconnected from their Hyderabadi roots, but because Omar is perceived by others to be Indian and/or Muslim depending on the situation, he naturally comes to have an identity crisis. I felt the author’s portrayal of Omar to really capture what it is like to feel lost at such a young age. With his parents caught up in their own problems and a huge gap in his knowledge of his family history, Omar begins to turn to Amina for guidance. But Amina’s own issues with commitment make her somewhat unreliable for him.
Throughout this, the realities of being Muslim in 2000s America, or really just having Muslim names, blows out of proportion situations that should have been brushed off. An incident with a knife ends up having undue consequences for Omar, and the author clearly shows the Islamophobia in the punishment and the bullying that led Omar to it. The author also did a great job of portraying how Omar’s disconnect with his Muslim and Indian heritage leads him to being more confused about how people treat him. He is trying to come to understand what it means to be perceived as Muslim even when he is not religious and has no one to guide him. The novel’s last section is set in India, and without going into too much detail, I was relieved that the author deftly portrayed the differences and similarities between the character’s life in India and the US. The threat of a majoritarian government has yet to come into fruition in India, but the author clearly shows how othering it is to be perceived as Muslim even there. India is not the homecoming the character may have thought it would be, but it still represents an important stage in the character’s development.
The author’s choices when it came to presenting the family’s culture and various elements of desi culture was thought provoking. For one thing, it is unusual to see a Hyderabadi Muslim family claim Hindi as their ancestral language. But I thought it was a bold choice to have the characters state misconceptions about different aspects of desi culture because they genuinely believed them. Omar, for example, believes initially that Hindus are more Indian than Muslims. Amina at one point gives a definition of desi to mean being of Indian heritage, when the term applies to some other South Asians as well. For a desi reader like myself it was easier to parse out the misconceptions from what was actually true, but it could lead to some non-desi readers believing these misconceptions.
Despite a somewhat unorganized start, I found that this novel built up emotion very well, so that by the end I was absolutely gripped by these characters’ stories. This portrait of a family struggling to stay together was incredibly moving. This is a book that skillfully balances heartwarming lighter moments with heartbreaking darker ones.