content warnings: racism and Islamophobia, hate crimes, terrorism, bullying, death threats, violence
representation: Muslim Indian-American protagonist, main and side characters

“My world slows down. My breathing, the journey of the drips of water that trail from his skin onto mine, the rise and fall of his chest, and the blink of his eyelids.

In the movies, you can achieve slow motion in two ways, first, by overcranking, basically capturing each frame at a much faster rate with your camera than it will be played back on a projector. Then there’s time stretching, where you inset new frames in postproduction between the ones already filmed but linger longer on each one. That’s what this feels like, but where each of the new frames I add is just a blank screen of longing.”

I'm going to be honest, the only reason that I own this book is because I found it at Savers and it was an ARC. I recognised the title and figured this would probably be my only chance to own a physical ARC, so I threw caution to the wind and bought it. Boy, am I glad I did because this was great!

Samira Ahmed's debut is about Muslim Indian-American teen Maya, an aspiring filmmaker who is in her last year of high school. She wants to go to NYU and become the first Indian-American to win an Oscar, but her parents want her to stay close to home and become a lawyer. But her parents don't know that she secretly applied to NYU and got in, so now she needs to figure out how to convince them to let her go. She also gets swept up in a love triangle between her, Kareem, a college student she meets at a family wedding, and Phil, a boy at her school who she's helping with an assignment.

For the first ten chapters, I was having fun but wasn't blown away. It felt like a regular, cute YA contemporary romance, with Maya's heart being torn in two directions as she's also trying to work up the courage to tell her parents what she wants. But then chapter 11 happened and suddenly I was sitting up in my metaphorical seat and paying attention. The events of the chapter aren't that extraordinary, but the way that Ahmed writes them is. Her writing is so emotional without ever being sappy in a way that I hadn't been appreciating up until that point. From there, the book just continued to amaze me.

A lot of darker stuff happens in the second half, but it isn't out of nowhere if you've been paying attention. As the book goes on, you start to realise how dark parts of the first half were and everything makes sense. The second half is also where basically all of the trigger warnings come into play so I would recommend some readers proceed with caution there.

Ahmed isn't just great at the technical skill of writing, though; her characters are incredible and I love them all. Maya has such a distinct voice that I thought was going to annoy me at first but then I ended up missing her the second I closed the book. She views the world and her life as a film, partially as a coping mechanism but also because she just loves films that much. She's one of the most passionate characters I've ever read about, and anytime she starts talking at length about anything film-related I found myself falling further in love with her. The end of the book is the perfect ending to her character. It's not about romance, or her parents, or the terrorist attack. It's about her and her passion.

I was worried after a few chapters that one of the boys in the love triangle was going to end up being an asshole so that Maya could have an easy choice, but thankfully it didn't do that! Kareem and Phil are just nice boys and I loved them. As much as I loved them, though, they probably rank towards the bottom in terms of main characters I loved, because Violet and Hina trump them easily. Violet is Maya's best friend and Hina is her aunt. They're both the absolute greatest. One of them is always present so that there's at least one person in Maya's corner, sometimes two, and I loved the support system that we see Maya building for herself.

I'm in general pretty wary of the way parents are written in YA because they're usually either the Worst or the Best, tropes which equally annoy me, so I was happy to see that Maya's parents were neither. They're just people who, like their daughter, sometimes do everything exactly right and sometimes colossally fuck up. Maya's relationship with them becomes more strained over the course of the book but luckily both Ahmed and Maya never make them the villains of the book. By the end, both they and Maya have grown and seem to understand the others' perspective more, even if they still disagree with it.

One of my favourite things about reading is picking up a book with no expectations and loving it, so this was a total success! The characters are the great, the romance is swoony, the tone is balanced so well, and the ending was incredible. I'm a few years late to this but I'm glad I got around to it, especially since I've heard that Samira Ahmed's follow-up to this, Internment, is also great.