“The more you lose, the better you get at it. The better you get, the less it hurts.”
From bestselling author Sabaa Tahir comes ALL MY RAGE — a brilliant, searing contemporary YA novel that sweeps across generations and continents. In equal measure painful and thoughtful, ALL MY RAGE is a moving exploration of family, faith, forgiveness, and the depths of rage. Nothing I can say will truly do this book justice, but know this: ALL MY RAGE may not be an easy read, but it is a redemptive one that belongs on every bookshelf.
Told in three separate first-person narrations, ALL MY RAGE splits its voice between best friends Salahudin and Noor in present day Juniper, California and Sal’s mother Misbah in Lahore, Pakistan decades earlier. The only two Pakistani students in their small desert town, Sal and Noor have been best friends their entire lives. Nobody “gets” them quite like each other. When we meet them, though, they’re not speaking — both still reeling from “The Fight” that drove them apart. Now navigating their individual, too-heavy struggles on their own — Sal scrambling to manage his family’s motel amid his mother’s failing health and his father’s alcoholism and Noor living under the vengeful care of her uncle while secretly applying to colleges as a way out of Jupiter — the two are sent back into each other’s lives in the wake of an impossible loss.
While ALL MY RAGE is very much character-driven, as its alternating timelines creep closer together, the plot takes off at a sprint and doesn’t stop until the very last page. It can be hard to read sometimes, and I was often left wishing that Sal and Noor didn’t have to deal with things quite that heavy. But these things are real, and teens do have to deal with them, and ALL MY RAGE speaks light and power into them in a way that is deeply necessary.
A final note: this book’s exploration of rage is something that I will marvel at for a very long time as Tahir expertly peels back the emotion’s red-hot surface to reveal pain, betrayal, defeat, fear, and grief through the stories of Misbah, Taufiq, Noor, and Salahudin. I need to get this onto the book discussion schedule at my library STAT.
CW: drug and alcohol addiction, physical abuse, Islamophobia, mentions of repressed sexual assault, tense exchange with law enforcement, death
From bestselling author Sabaa Tahir comes ALL MY RAGE — a brilliant, searing contemporary YA novel that sweeps across generations and continents. In equal measure painful and thoughtful, ALL MY RAGE is a moving exploration of family, faith, forgiveness, and the depths of rage. Nothing I can say will truly do this book justice, but know this: ALL MY RAGE may not be an easy read, but it is a redemptive one that belongs on every bookshelf.
Told in three separate first-person narrations, ALL MY RAGE splits its voice between best friends Salahudin and Noor in present day Juniper, California and Sal’s mother Misbah in Lahore, Pakistan decades earlier. The only two Pakistani students in their small desert town, Sal and Noor have been best friends their entire lives. Nobody “gets” them quite like each other. When we meet them, though, they’re not speaking — both still reeling from “The Fight” that drove them apart. Now navigating their individual, too-heavy struggles on their own — Sal scrambling to manage his family’s motel amid his mother’s failing health and his father’s alcoholism and Noor living under the vengeful care of her uncle while secretly applying to colleges as a way out of Jupiter — the two are sent back into each other’s lives in the wake of an impossible loss.
While ALL MY RAGE is very much character-driven, as its alternating timelines creep closer together, the plot takes off at a sprint and doesn’t stop until the very last page. It can be hard to read sometimes, and I was often left wishing that Sal and Noor didn’t have to deal with things quite that heavy. But these things are real, and teens do have to deal with them, and ALL MY RAGE speaks light and power into them in a way that is deeply necessary.
A final note: this book’s exploration of rage is something that I will marvel at for a very long time as Tahir expertly peels back the emotion’s red-hot surface to reveal pain, betrayal, defeat, fear, and grief through the stories of Misbah, Taufiq, Noor, and Salahudin. I need to get this onto the book discussion schedule at my library STAT.
CW: drug and alcohol addiction, physical abuse, Islamophobia, mentions of repressed sexual assault, tense exchange with law enforcement, death