Staff Review: "Love, Hate & Other Filters" by Samira Ahmed

What do librarians do all day? Well, it depends on the day, but one of my favorite tasks is picking out new books for the library's collection. A side benefit to buying books for the library is that publishers offer us advance access to review books that they hope will be popular. Which is how I recently had the chance to review Love, Hate & Other Filters by Samira Ahmed, a book that will be published on January 16.

This is Ahmed's first, or debut, novel, and like the publisher, I hope that it will be popular. The book is written for a teen audience, but I imagine many adult readers will enjoy it as much as I did. One element that Dubuque readers might find particularly appealing is the book's Illinois setting.

Maya Aziz is a high school senior who dreams of going to school in New York to become a documentary filmmaker. Her parents left India for America for a chance at a better life for themselves and their daughter, a life they've found in their rural suburb of Chicago where they have built a successful dental practice. However their dreams for Maya's success are more along the lines of attending college close to home, a career as a doctor or a lawyer, and a marriage with a nice Muslim boy.

Maya wants to be a good daughter and make her parents happy, but part of growing up is learning what is important to you. The tension between parents, especially immigrant parents, and their children as they become adults is a common story in literature, and it's handled very well here. Readers who read and loved When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon are likely to also enjoy Love, Hate & Other Filters.

What sets Ahmed's book apart, however, is a larger focus on the Aziz family's identity as Muslim Americans and how that shapes their experience. Ahmed doesn't shy away from the impacts of racism and Islamophobia, both subtle and overt, that exist in our country.

MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW

Maya is the narrator for most of the  novel, but in between chapters there are short pieces, a page or two at most, from other people's perspectives. Readers will quickly come to suspect that the people in these short pieces are tied to some terrible event. An event that, even though Maya will never have met any of the people involved, will have a profound effect on her life.

Many readers are likely to quickly share my suspicion that the story being told in these short pieces is a tragedy, specifically a terrorist attack. The tension that Ahmed created by interjecting these hints of something awful in a story that is otherwise charming kept me reading late into the night. The joy of watching Maya learn to stand up for her dreams and the warmth of first love paired with the seasick dread and tension of a coming tragedy created a book more impactful and human than either story might have been on its own.

~Sarah, Adult Services