Has anyone else read Does My Head Look Big In This? by Randa Abdel-Fattah? I’ve got a review up at Goodreads. I’d give it 3.5-4 stars out of 5. It was definitely teenlit, but nuanced nonetheless.
It’s the rare novel about young Muslim women (regardless of whether or not it’s written by Muslim women) that expressly tackles (in this case, straight) sexuality. So there’s a moment when the narrator waxes lustful over her crush’s forearms. It was cute, but perhaps not that interesting, except I can’t remember the last time a teenage girl in hijab was allowed to wax lustful about anything in a novel without it triggering an unnecessarily involved conversation about forced marriages and eternal damnation.
Race and racism is also a recurring theme. The protagonist falls neither into “But I’m just as Australian as you why do you hate me” camp nor into “I will never belong here I am so alone woe is me” camp, but instead moves between the two anxieties in a way that felt true to me. That kind of nuance, however commonplace in the lived realities of Muslims in the west, is sorely lacking in the novels and films that get churned out about them, because they trouble the assimilated/terrorist trope we’ve all come to know and love so well.
Given that this is about urban Australia, immigration is another theme. So we have lonely Greek neighbour, the hyperassimilated Arab uncle, the hatred of East Asians, etc. In other words, this isn’t a story about Muslims v Whites (aka East meets West), but about the much more complex (and interesting and honest) intersections of global migration in the world today.
