mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

Huda F (a lightly fictionalized version of the author) is the new kid at her Dearborn high school, and she finds herself unsure of who she is anymore now that she's not the only hijabi in class. As she struggles to find her place in a Muslim community that's diverse and vibrant, but also vulnerable in its visibility, she has some tough lessons to learn in the course of figuring out who she really is and what her core values are.

Fahmy does a good job of expressing what it's like to be an awkward, confused kid who can't fit into any of the cliques, and she is able to depict her inevitably cringey teenage behavior with a certain warmth and empathy, which avoids making it feel like she's dumping on her past self. She was just a kid! The art style is very simple, but it gets the point across.

One thing I did find odd is that the book is evidently set in the present day—a plot point hinges on a TikTok video—but Fahmy is actually in her 30s now, so she would have been in high school in the early 2000s. It seems to me like a strange choice to deliberately remove these events from their original context of the aftermath of 9/11, especially since many characters' actions and reactions seem obviously influenced by that milieu. Maybe Fahmy was trying to make the story more relatable to the intended YA audience, but I don't think the very different world of today's teenagers was fully realized enough for that to work either. (Aside from the TikTok incident, nobody ever talks about social media or uses their phone for anything! Huda googles things on a desktop computer!!) So that was distracting to me.

That said, it was a super quick read (maybe 30 minutes, tops) so if it sounds interesting to you, you can't really go wrong giving it a whirl.