Review: Saints and Misfits by S.K. Ali

This book follows Janna, an Arab-Indian American teen girl who is struggling with finding her place in the social life of high school and the mosque. She wears a hijab and that instantly makes her stick out at her high school, and when she tries to be a bit more “Western” it makes her stick out in the Muslim community. As she struggles to find a balance she must also deal with a predator who has set his sights on her, and as she slowly finds the strength to stand up to him, she finds new friends and loses some old ones along the way. 

I’m a bit conflicted about this book, because while I liked the basis of the story, there was also a lot of things that I didn’t really appreciate. I listened to it on audio and I do feel like the narrator had a part in my not liking it too much. The narrator would over-enunciate everything and that would make conversations sound kind of fake and overly enthusiastic. Sometimes it would also sound really whiny, especially in Janna’s inner monologue, but here I think it was equal parts the writing and the narration that did it. The writing also suffered in other parts, especially conversations could get a bit clunky with a lot of she said, then I said, then she said, then I said. The ending was also really fragmented. Maybe it would have been easier to process if I had read it physically and seen the paragraphs, but in the audiobook suddenly she was going to tell someone something, then she was at home, then the previous someone was hugging her - the time line just got a little confused at the end. 

As for the characters I felt like I never really got to know Janna and her friends, mostly because I felt like Janna didn’t really open up to her friends enough. She had one very strictly Muslim friend and one Western friend, who apparently didn’t know each other. With both of them I felt like Janna hid parts of her personality and then got mad at them when they didn’t understand what was going on. She would ditch her friends pretty summarily and then pick back up with them or new ones as long as they suited her motives at that certain time, which I thought seemed pretty cold on Janna’s part. I initially started the book assuming Janna and her friends were around 17 years old, but along the way I started really questioning if I had misunderstood something. They seemed more like 14 years old by the end, mainly because of the whining, and they felt pretty emotionally immature. 

I really liked getting a story from a Muslim perspective, as it is not a viewpoint I often read from. I found all the tidbits on Muslim culture and everyday life interesting, but as I said I did have some problems with the characters and the writing. I gave this book 3 stars out of 5.