Noor and Sal live in the desert town of Juniper, California. As part of the tiny Muslim community, they are treated as outsiders in school. Their lives have been filled with trouble and tragedy, but they have grown up almost as brother and sister under the loving eye of Sal’s mother Misbah. It is the voices of these three complex and wonderfully-developed characters that narrate this engrossing YA title.
This clever novel is an allegory about embracing your difference and just being yourself.
Morgan Stone is a regular teenager who lives with her best friend, her mother just happens to be a world famous fitness guru whose success is built on the idea of bodily perfection. Morgan has an unusual secret, though: a perfect hole in the middle of her body. She has spent the last seventeen years hiding her difference from everyone except her family and her closest friend.
As we know in Ireland, internment without trial is a crude and cruel approach that humiliates and dehumanizes its victims and opens wounds in society that can take years to heal. When this happens to Muslims in a near-future America, teenager Layla and her family are forced to choose between acquiescence and short-term safety, or putting their lives in danger to fight back against a state that supposedly promises ‘liberty and justice for all.’
When Kat is cyberbullied, she decides her only option is to delete her online profiles and disappear from the internet for good. It doesn’t take long for her to realise that it wasn’t just her online persona that has gone – soon her physical body starts fading, too. Only her bully remembers her, but will he get the courage to fight for her existence?
Morgan is trying to find her identity and place in her world. She’s bright and passionate, with a curiosity and beliefs that put her at odds with her conservative Christian school. What separates Morgan’s story from countless others is that amongst the typical struggles to find her voice Morgan is also dealing with clinical depression.
Pablo Neruda Rind is a twenty-year-old college dropout who spends his nights working in a New York bodega, trying to pay off the debt from his credit card and student loans. Nineteen-year-old Leanna Smart, meanwhile, is a high-flying musician and movie star who owns a multi-million dollar cosmetics company. When Leanna wanders into Pablo’s workplace at five o’clock in the morning, the sparks begin to fly – but of course, dating an A-list celebrity comes with its own set of problems.
In this story about the world of teen influencers, nothing is quite what it seems. Once the glitter and gloss are peeled away, we see characters who are dealing with serious issues behind the scenes and away from the social media screens.
At first glance, this is a just another story about a blended family, but it soon becomes clear that there is so much more to it. Leah and her dad are still traumatised and not dealing with the tragic loss of Leah’s mother and baby sister when she was younger; Ellie longs to be famous and get lots of views for her YouTube channel, but how can she make herself stand out without bringing even more attention to her new family? Then there’s Boyd, a troubled lad who is trying to prove that he’s every bit as dangerous as the rest of the gang he’s joined. What is his connection to the others?
At seventeen Khayyam is already an academic has-been, after a daring art history essay that she thought would make her a prodigy led to humiliation instead. She expects to spend the summer in her father’s Paris apartment, licking her wounds and pining over her maybeboyfriend’s Instagram feed. An encounter with a dashing young descendant of Alexandre Dumas offers her a chance to prove that her theory about the famous writer having been in possession of a lost Delacroix painting is right after all.
Cariad has moved from one foster home to another throughout her entire childhood and adolescence. She’s angry, feels lost and like she doesn’t have anywhere to belong. When she is placed with an elderly Christian couple in a small town, she doesn’t believe things will change for her any time soon. She begins to make friends with an extremely religious group of young women, but how long can she pretend to be pious just like them?
