A review by longjensilver
The War to Save the Worlds by Samira Ahmed

Did not finish book. Stopped at 42%.

The Muslim protagonists and characters from Islamic oral history were refreshing and much-needed representation in middle grades lit. I particularly liked the jinn characters. However, I prose was impossible to read for me. The character actions and dialogue are unnatural and more fitting for a chapter book. The narration style is first-person present-tense, which is already a stretch (though not impossible to pull off!) , and the narrator has a constant stream-of-consciousness narration. I think the asides and unrelated thoughts are meant to demonstrate that the protagonist has ADHD and has a hard time focusing on what she's doing, but as a reader it's incredibly distracting. With full respect to the author who has written about these important issues in fiction and interviews, reflections on Islamophobia, cultural appropriation, and other important issues are given the same frivolity as the frequent, distracting pop-culture references (I promise middle-grades readers can understand folklore without comparing everything to a movie). Ahmed's previous work addresses these issues unflinchingly and so it was disappointing to see issues that middle-grades readers are capable of understanding given such little weight.