Does My Head Look Big in This?
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Does My Head Look Big in This?
Grades 6 & up
Realistic Fiction
When Michael Met Mina Noah's Law |
Book Summary:
Amal is a sixteen-year-old girl with concerns about friends, family rules, and interest in a cute boy at school. She is also making a decision to wear the hijab full time, including to school. She knows it will attract some attention and judgment, but she also reflects about it as a personal decision regarding her faith. She knows it's going to take some fortitude to be different in a crowd of uniform-wearing private school students. Book Review: I'm glad to see diverse characters in middle grade / YA fiction, and the protagonist is easily accessible to Western audiences - and, as it's set in Australia and not the U.S. - that's an extra diversity bonus. It has a few nice small moments, but it's at least 200 pages longer than it needs to be. The references are dated (publication in 2005), but even if you get past them, the dialogue is not especially insightful or humorous, even though characters are frequently doubled over laughing at their own fairly banal jokes that any ordinary person could hear at the mall. Some of the language in the book makes it inappropriate for most upper elementary students, even though in terms of sophistication and maturity, it's probably a match for 5th grade. Although it addresses issues of personal identity vs. conformity, prejudice, blindness, and the power of tradition, the observations about these issues are all told, not shown. There is conversation after conversation, interspersed with internal dialogue, without very much action. It's unusable as a book discussion group in a school, because there is no place to make an inference about anything - everything is stated directly and repeated through various iterations of the same conflict. This book could have used tighter editing, as multiple scenes and characters were completely unnecessary. Overall, I think the intention of creating this character with this problem was a good one. I wish the execution had more depth. "Does My Head Look Big in This? quote"
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