Nina is a Pakistani-American Muslim girl in a small town in New York. She feels like an outcast among most of her schoolmates because she can’t date or go out with friends, plus she thinks she’s very ugly, especially because of her body hair. She also suffers at home, where she doesn’t feel she can live up to her sister’s brains or her parents’ expectations of her.

This book is what you could call a typical coming of age story, set on a cross-cultural background. There is nothing particularly different in it from other coming of age stories with regards to Nina’s relationships with family, friends, boys, or school enemies. Those things all turn out exactly how you might expect. Where its uniqueness lies is in the cultural conflicts.

Nina is Pakistani-American, but has never been to Pakistan. She has grown up in America, surrounded by Pakistani customs, food, and culture at home but immersed in American culture outside of the home. She’s caught in a conflict between two worlds and doesn’t know how to reconcile them. Her parents want her to grow up to be exactly what they expect she would have been had she grown up in Pakistan. Nina has only superficial cultural and religious ties to the country, though. She wants to be what she considers “normal.” She wants to be American.

That’s what interested me in the book and kept me reading. While I didn’t think the book was quite as good at addressing these topics as the last one I read – Shine, Coconut Moon – I did enjoy it. It’s the sort of book I’d be happy to let my kids read when they’re a little older, especially to get a broader cultural perspective. I do wish we’d gotten to see more of Pakistan, though…I was really hoping to spend more time outside America!

The only thing that really threw me off was the time period this book took place in. I didn’t realize until about three-quarters of the way through that it takes place in the 90s, though I was confused about references to listening to cassettes. Once it mentioned the “new idea” of email, I placed the time frame. In some ways, though, it seemed to take place even earlier than that, because there was all this big deal about interracial couples. Nina’s friend starts to date a black boy from Grenada and they all worry what her parents will think. That seemed really peculiar to me, like it could have been set in the 70s or early 80s instead.

Despite my confusion, I thought this was a good YA book about growing up caught between two cultures.