What strikes me most about this excerpt is how convincingly Minah feels like a teenager, with a mix of feeling very assured about her own views (like being a vegetarian) and commenting on the flaws of adults, but also struggling a lot to deal with things like grief, conflict, and moving in a very realistic way. She's such a full and believable character already, and her complicated feelings about her mother's death are therefore believable too and make her sympathetic. Overall this just makes her situation draw the reader in and want to know how she handles it. I also like all the descriptions of the setting and the city, it felt noisy and full in a very palpable way.