ON THE MORNING OF SATURDAY, March 14, fourteen-year-old Adam Chen went to the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha.
A thirteenth-century drawing of a tree caught his gaze. It wasn’t particularly striking or artistic. He didn’t know why this tree caused him to stride forward as if magnetized. (When he thinks about it now, his guess is thus: Trees were kind of missing in the landscape he found himself in at the time, and so he was hungry for them.)
Once he got close, he was rewarded with the name of the manuscript that housed this simple tree sketch: The Marvels of Creation and the Oddities of Existence.
He stood there thinking about this grand title for a long moment.
Then something clicked in his mind: Maybe that’s what living is—recognizing the marvels and oddities around you.
From that day, he vowed to record the marvels he knew to be true and the oddities he wished weren’t.
Adam, being Adam, found himself marveling more than ruminating on the weird bits of existing.
We pick up his Marvels and Oddities journal on March 7, four years after that Saturday at the Museum of Islamic Art.
Eighteen now, Adam is a freshman in college, but it’s important to know that he has stopped going to classes two months ago.
He has decided to live.
• • •
On the very late evening of Saturday, March 11, sixteen-year-old Zayneb Malik clicked on a link in her desperation to finish a project. She’d promised a Muslim Clothing Through the Ages poster for the Islamic History Fair at the mosque, and it was due in nine hours, give or take a few hours of sleep.
Perhaps it was because of the late hour, but the link was oddly intriguing to a girl looking for thirteenth-century hijab styles: Al-Qazwini’s Catalogue of Life as It Existed in the Islamic World, 1275 AD.
The link opened to an ancient book.
The Marvels of Creation and the Oddities of Existence.
A description of the book followed, but Zayneb could not read on.
“Marvels” and “oddities” perfectly described the reality of her life right then.
The next day, after returning from the history fair (and taking a nap), she began a journal and kept it going for the next two years, recording the wonders and thorns in the garden of her life.
Zayneb, being Zayneb, focused on the latter. She dedicated her journal entries to pruning the prickly overgrowth that stifled her young life.
By the time we meet her at eighteen, she’s become an expert gardener, ready to shear the world.
She’s also just been suspended from school.
Review by
Zuri S, Reviewer
Last updated on 20 Jun 2019
My Recommendation
My Recommendation
There was a time that I would just choose books based on their jacket cover description or because I was familiar with the author. There wasn’t a lot of depth to the reasoning behind my selections - I just liked a good story. These days, I still really like a good story, but there’s more to gain from the books I choose, especially when it comes to fiction. I’m finding that today’s fiction frequently skirts the line between real-life and the imagined, drawing out the reader’s empathy and making it easier to access new perspectives, and S.K. Ali’s “Love from A to Z” is no different. Zayneb is an empassioned and devout Muslim teenager, and the only Muslim in a high school class led by an Islamophobic teacher. When she has had enough and confronts her teacher, she is suspended from school and heads to Doha, Qatar to spend two weeks with her Auntie Nandy. On the flight there, she meets Adam, a “supercute” college student on his way home for spring break. Although they don’t recognize it at first, the two fall instantly in love, and continue to be brought together through a series of serendipitous events. Despite having the tone of the light and sweet awkwardness of first love, “Love from A to Z” carries with it more dark and serious themes. Ali weaves together the Muslim experience, grief, politics, the death of a parent, and multiple sclerosis, in an effortless way that doesn’t overwhelm the narrative. Her characters are very relatable and the messages imparted through them are so important, that one can’t help but feel a sense of essential insight and awareness by the end of this beautiful book. Ali states in her Author’s Note, that she writes “for all of you - those who know what it feels like and those who don’t, but want to,” and I highly recommend that we all become the readers who want to.
Thank you S.K. Ali for sharing your voice, and thank you to Net Galley and Simon & Schuster Canada for the opportunity to review this advance reader copy.
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