Idk why but I didn’t fuck with this!! It was just a little bit too slow for my liking and while all the pieces were there for me to like it I don’t think it quite came together for me!! Objectively beautiful writing but I was bored out of my mind sorry!!

I’m so mixed because I love conceptually the interplay and levels of (un)reality and questions of authorship and its reliability, the signs and symbols, the book itself as labyrinth. i love the playing with format and the mysteries strewn through abt that (like the morse code?? ooo creepyyyy…) and i liked the navidson storyline a lot!! but johnny truant was lowkey my enemy throughout and made this such a SLOG to get through. so i think i have to sit and think about it a little more for my thoughts to properly solidify but right now what im feeling is that this was a liiiiitle overhyped for me, not even by anyone but just bc of its reputation. kinda like if i was told i should climb Mount Everest for the most gorgeous view ever and when i got up there it was pretty beautiful but not really something i NEEDED to climb fucking Mount Everest for. And like the climb was definitely fun but also sometimes miserable…. You get me? 

Very cute but a lot going on, and I don't think of it got the right amount of focus... like maybe with about 100 pages more there'd be a bit more in-depth exploration. But also. Book for 12 year olds. And 12 year old me would have really appreciated this!

Got bored and also lost abt what was going on…. 

Cute, if a bit predictable but that's not a crime in the romance genre. The You've Got Mail thing is a little less believable when one of the characters is actively podcasting about her life (is Aydin stupid? Because if I listened to a podcaster for years and met someone who sounded exactly like them, matched up with the demographic info i knew about them, and worked in radio, I think i would figure out pretty quick), but WHO CARES they were cute !!! Hana is the real star here tho (obviously, the book is named after her), she felt like a friend probably because we're so close in age and both in kind of transitional limbo periods of our life, and even though I was worried for her I was so happy things turned out well for her :D

One thing I really really like about the way Jalaluddin writes romance is that she doesn't rely on spice to develop her romantic relationships... don't get me wrong I love a good sex scene and like the sex kissing horniness etc are obvi a part of romance but I've recently been feeling like a lot of romance writers are using those things as crutches or stand-ins for relationship development. Like me personally I don't think it's compelling when the two main characters meet and whoever's pov we're in immediately wants the other person like they're a man dying of thirst running into a glass of water, and then has to fight the attraction for arbitrary reasons like "oh but I don't like him"... whereas imo the enemies to lovers dynamic Hana and Aydin had going on was a lot stronger because they DID genuinely dislike each other at one point, and then they became FRIENDS, and THEN it got romantic, but there were complications when they REACHED there.

Also, if I had a nickel for every book I read back-to-back with a

reveal that the main male character, a diasporic Muslim whose last name starts with Sha-, thought his mom was dead but she died at an age where he was too young to remember and truly mourn her, BUT his mom was alive this whole time, also she had post-partum when he was born

... i'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice, and in a row, right?

Overall had a good time with this :D

I really really really REALLY loved this… until i didn’t, but i can overlook the stuff that didn’t work for me. Most of all i love — it makes me cry i love it so much — that we now get books from queer muslims about queer muslims and that my queer muslim self can cry over them because oh my god, someone HAS been thinking about all these things too, someone else GETS IT, this thing i always thought was incongruous and impossible to share. i adored cyrus as a character, because even though our lives don’t actually overlap much at all, reading about and from him felt kind of like getting out of the shower and looking in the mirror and seeing yourself (myself) without all the other stuff we put on around people (not just clothes i mean but how when we know we’re being perceived we act different) and then seeing the mirror-self get kinda freaked out by that. i felt that from page one and it was wonderful. which is why i think i didn’t really enjoy the big revelation all that much! I think

Orkideh being Cyrus’ mom (!!!)

actually felt a little bit cheap, because it’s obviously something that shakes Cyrus to the CORE (of course!) but then what we get feels like the author explaining how that’s possible, and we sit with Cyrus for a moment after, and the book ends. Like, here’s this guy who had one of the core pillars of his life just ripped out from under him, and it doesn’t feel like we explored it at all!!

Orkideh gets to talk about the feeling of dying twice, but I don’t think I really saw Cyrus’ thoughts about mourning twice, mourning over and over again, and only finding out what he really lost until she died for realsies. THAT I think would have been a beautiful turning point to further explore ?

But then again, a book where your biggest complaint is “i wish it didn’t end where it did but go on and on and on and on” is a special and beautiful thing. so even if the ending fell a bit flat i can safely say i adored this book. kaveh akbar i will be keeping up

I think this was just ok for me sadly! I see a lot of reviews saying they were stressed out about Ember's lies snowballing, but funnily enough that was one of the more interesting parts of the book for me, while the romance was, tbh, boring. It felt very insta-lovey, and while Ember was a really strong character, I feel like Danuwoa didn't really have anything going for me to latch onto. Like, he was TOO perfect? Which made him feel fake, not he's-trying-too-hard in-text fake but this-guy-is-not-real out-of-text fake? Like I personally prefer a romance where both parties are the main characters (even if they're not both povs!!) as opposed to following one and the other is just The Love Interest. When

she got him back after the third-act breakup, it didn't feel like "Yay Ember & Danuwoa are back together" but rather "Yay Ember got the guy and is happy"

. 

Also -- and this is not the book's fault tbh -- I just couldn't handle how capital-H Heterosexual everything felt.... yes including the queer rep... tho shout-out to my girl Natalie!

Anyway I'm still looking forward to whatever Nava writes next! 

I don't ever want to see a single salt crystal ever again!!!!!!

Ok real talk: if you think the history of salt would be boring.... you'd be wrong in that there IS something interesting deep down, but right in that this was the blandest way to tell it. And also you're telling me the medieval islamic world wasn't doing shit with salt? what about the ottoman empire? india before the british raj?? africa?? but no........ this "world history" only cares about white people, and also mentions chinese people but in kind of a weird grudging way where it seems to wish it wasn't. the book just FEELS 2002 and nowhere is it more obvious than in the two chapters about gandhi and the role of salt in the indian anticolonial movement to... a chapter about israel & the dead sea that uncritically presents herzl's "turning the desert green" as like. a thing that is True and Good........ hmm all around. hmmmmmm. the guy who did the audiobook did his best to make it interesting tho, and there were some very fun facts throughout... but that does NOT mean there needed to be a long-ass boring book around them!! pop history you will answer for your crimes eventually!!

I have no intelligent thoughts about this tbh…… just huge respect for what it was doing as a book and the emotional freight train that belatedly hit me after i finished it. I think I’d need to reread (ON PAPER — reading this on kindle was STUPID!!!!) to tease out actual thoughts but some passages made me feel So Much and it was only amplified by the fact that this book is ALMOST 100 YEARS OLD…. Scary stuff.

As for my snarky stupid idiot review I would write if this was a 3.5 star movie on letterboxd: Rip Mrs. Dalloway… born far too early to have huge superspreader ragers in the summer of 2020 and be bisexual