Shadi has a whole bunch of conflict going on in her life right now -- her brother died, her father is in the hospital, her mom is dealing with depression, her sister is a jerk, her "best friend" has abandoned her, and to top it all off, it's directly in the aftermath of 9/11. As she tries to navigate all of this, the reader watches her grow into a stronger and more mature young woman.

Tahereh Mafi is one of the best YA romance writers in the game right now, and this one sure does deliver. With her careful and elaborate prose, there is something so swoon-worthy about every book she has written. Sure, there were parts that didn't seem realistic, but for this hopeless romantic, this book was incredibly satisfying.

My biggest criticism of this book is that it feels unfinished. Not that there isn't a resolution at the end, as other reviewers have said here. If every string was tied up in a neat little bow and her life was perfect at the end, it wouldn't feel realistic. The ending made sense. It is a bit rushed, with much of the character development happening in a few pages with Shadi directly reflecting on her life. Where the book feels unfinished is throughout the entire thing! I think it needed to be longer. Noah, a character who is introduced a little less than halfway through is barely in here and serves seemingly no purpose other than as another way to address religious/racial issues. And I'm not sure that any of the racial profiling and bullying that Shadi experiences was actually necessary for the plot. It seems as an extra, added to the long list of conflicts in her life. It made sense for her to mention it, but some of the scenes of direct conflict seemed rushed and not well addressed/developed. For a teenager, any one of these conflicts that Shadi has to deal with would be enough to shake her world, so I wish Mafi had pared those down to develop each point and resolve it in a more realistic way.

What made me love this book is the romance, and for that, I'd give this book all the stars. If that's your thing, pick this book up now.

This was a heartbreaking book. I would recommend to older high school students. I think this would be a great novel to connect with the events of 9/11 when they learn about it in history class. It puts faces and lives to an event and the lasting impacts. I will read anything this author writes.

I was hesitant. I won’t lie. I loved Mafi’s first novel so much that I wondered if it was possible to love this one at the same level. Oh, how my worries were in vain. I tried to explain this one to my husband tonight & I found myself coming up short. The surface description reveals nothing of the depth and insightful nature of this novel. There is one storyline that seems more of a propulsion device than something that contributes to the development of the text, but that’s a minor observation. That observation has no bearing on the quality of the text.

An Emotion of Great Delight showcases that Tahereh Mafi is an incredibly gifted writer. Her way with words, as we’ve seen before in Shatter Me and A Very Large Expanse of Sea, is lyrical and deeply moving, and the way that she captures feelings and emotions in just a few words is truly second-to-none.

However, I had a difficult time with this book in the end. For how beautiful the prose is, and how important some of the subject matter considered is, something feels lacking in the pages. Despite big themes beautifully written, plot and secondary character development fall by the wayside early on and disappear almost entirely in the final act.

To start with what I did enjoy: the narrative was engaging, split between the “present day” (2003) and a few flashbacks to “Last Year”. It’s a simple narrative structure that doesn’t try to be a grander than it has to be, which works well in showing a more true-to-life depiction of the life of a Muslim teenager in the first few post-9/11 years.

Shadi’s life hasn’t been one of great joy, and through the story Mafi is telling we are able to understand and appreciate her situation easily. Following her path over the few days we get to know her is a breeze — albeit a fairly sad breeze.

What you’ll really come to realise within the first few pages of this book is that it’s not going to be an uplifting ride from start to finish. That’s another thing that Mafi has done incredibly well; she has deeply and expertly explored grief, especially that of members of the Muslim community in an extremely racially tense period of modern American history. It’s not always enjoyable to read, but Mafi touches on subjects that aren’t often touched upon. From her brother’s tragic death the year prior, to her father’s ongoing health issues, to her mother’s struggles coping, we don’t just get a glimpse at grief; we get the whole spectrum. The writing is the highlight of An Emotion of Great Delight, particularly for how Mafi handles such delicate topics.

However, the book felt like it was missing something. There’s little time for the story to breathe, and though that’s an intentional choice, much of what happens seems to lack any real payoff, and on the surface serves little purpose more than to get Shadi from one point to the next. We watch her life for a few days, but by the end, it feels almost more like we’ve seen a few quick snapshots of events rather than following an arc through to completion.

In terms of narrative, the story promises little early on and barely follows through on what it does. Storylines and characters are introduced for seemingly very little reason and (in the case of one secondary character who feels like he might as well have been cut altogether) are dropped completely by the end.

The main issue is the lack of closure. I understand that there’s a point to there being so little closure to many plot points, but I just don’t think that it worked here, especially with so little happening story-wise.

In the early chapters, I felt like I was rooting for Shadi; her situation is bleak, and I wanted the best for her. As the story progressed, I was still rooting for her, but I honestly don’t know what I was rooting for. I wanted her to be okay, but is that enough for a narrative? I knew what had happened in her life, but I don’t know if I can say exactly what I wanted for her. The story, what little there was, became lost behind the bigger conversations that Mafi was having in the prose.

Which, again, takes me back to what I enjoyed about An Emotion of Great Delight. The conversations about mental health and grief, about family, especially in the Muslim American community, come from a perspective that I haven’t seen much of and feel we need to consider more from. Own voices novels like these are vital in today’s society for readers like me.

It’s a shame then that, structurally, this novel really failed to connect. As I wrote at the beginning; Tahereh Mafi is a wonderful writer. The way that she weaves the themes of escalating grief and loneliness through every aspect of An Emotion of Great Delight is poignant and crucially important, but with little going on in between, poorly realised characters outside of Shadi and her family, and an unsatisfying ending, I found it difficult to love this book.

Editor’s Note: Content warnings for depression and self-harm. It would also be remiss of me not to mention that there’s an unexpected and extremely derogatory remark about the burqa by the main character which is never explained or referenced again.

An enjoyable YA book centering around the loss of many things that are important to main character. In a short amount of time she lost her brother to death, her dad to anger, her best friend to jealousy and the love of her life to duty, pride and misdirected loyalty. While reading this book you can feel the profound sadness of the main character who further complicates her own grief by imprisoning herself in everyone else's perceived expectations and handling everything single-handedly. Until she realizes that she's not really handing it at all. This is really as story about conflict as the main character is conflicted in nearly every facet of her life; religion, friendship, family and love. The only thing that really left me scratching my head was the introduction of Noah's character which felt like it was going to be developed and the author then decided to just wrap everything up and forgot about that loose piece. I don't mind unresolved endings, in fact I prefer them, but this character did not seem to really have a part in the story.

This is a book about being sad. It's more than that, of course, but if I had to distill it down to it's most basic essence, that's it.

Set in 2003, Shadi is a Muslim hijabi girl navigating so much: being Muslim in America post-9/11, the death of her older brother and how it has affected her family and how they all interact, the loss of her best friend, conflicted feelings about a boy. She's grieving for so much more than the loss of her brother, and, it seems, doing it all in silence. If you are into reading stories about those who are navigating grief and sadness, this is for you.

Mafi continues to move readers with her newest novel, An Emotion of Great Delight. I am constantly amazed by Mafi's use of language to show readers instead of tell. I will use sections of this novel in my class with looking at characterization, literary devices, and conflict. This is the perfect novel for students and adults.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced copy of An Emotion of Great Delight.

This is my second Tahereh Mafi novel and I devoured it, all the while not wanting it to end. Her realistic fiction is a thing of beauty, and the prose she creates to describe feelings and heartache is absolutely stunning. In An Emotion of Great Delight we meet Shadi, a Muslim American teen who is going through IT. Family tragedy, high political tensions in 2003, problems with friends- she is struggling to get through every day and with Mafi's beautiful words we can feel every pain and doubt she is going through. This novel will make you feel rage, hope, love and despair, as you root for her to find her footing, to reach out for help, to find a way to heal. I loved so many of these characters and was truly sad when I read the last sentence and realized it was over. As always, I look forward to reading her next book, as she takes you through such a wide array of emotions and leaves you slightly heartbroken, but in such a good way.

In An Emotion of Great Delight Shadi, an Iranian American teen, is struggling to deal with a plethora of problems in the aftermath of her brother's death. Her father is hospitalized having had two heart attacks, her mother is depressed, her best friend Zahra is ignoring her and it's 2003 and Islamaphobia is raging. Shadi, who wears a hijab, experiences prejudice from her teachers, other students and the community. Zahra has stopped wearing a hijab and is furious that her brother Ali is interested in Shadi. With her school work suffering and her lack of support at home, Shadi turns to Ali for comfort. This exploration of grief, racism, mental illness and discrimination is a compelling read and a window on the world of Muslim teens.

this book started suddenly and ended suddenly. i don’t think the main character felt happy once in the book and she externalized every sad emotion she had. didn’t understand the timeline at all. would’ve given it 1 star if it weren’t for tahereh mafi’s beautiful writing style.

From YA fantasy to contemporary novels such as A very large expanse of sea, Mafi nails it every time for me. The emotional toll I felt while reading this book for our, and especially with the ending of a friendship felt so relatable to me! Just like her previous YA contemporary novel I devoured this in one go because it was definitely a page turner.

As we talked about recent favorite books, several students praised the Shatter Me series by Tahereh Mafi. They will also appreciate her new standalone novel, AN EMOTION OF GREAT DELIGHT. Mafi is an amazingly talented writer; her A Very Large Expanse of Sea was longlisted for the National Book Award. She sets AN EMOTION OF GREAT DELIGHT in 2003, shortly after the September 11 attacks and explores Islamophobia as well as coming of age issues dealing with parental expectations, questions of faith, friendships, and first love. Shadi is finishing high school while trying to deal with several family traumas. The circumstances are overwhelming and she muses, "People thought I was growing up, and perhaps I was, perhaps this was growing up – this, this, an uncertain spiral into a darkness lined with teeth."

Mafi's words invoke empathy for Shadi and also for students who may be dealing with individual situations (particularly in the last fifteen months) of which teachers and other adults may not be aware. As Shadi says, "I made it to the sidewalk and stared at my feet, my heart beating erratically in my chest. I'd been fighting tears all day, all week, all year; it was exhausting." Shadi's struggles encompass health issues and a death in her family, plus feelings for Ali, brother of her best friend Zahra, all of which are tempered by cultural expectations: "I could not deny the beliefs that shaped me any more than I could deny the color of my eyes. It made for a lonely life .... lived, always, on the uncertain plane of a hyphen." I strongly recommend this novel, both for the important universal themes it explores and for the quality of the writing ("The sunlight was heavy today, fingers of heat forming sweaty hands that braced my face…"). AN EMOTION OF GREAT DELIGHT received enthusiastic stared reviews from Booklist ("A bluntly powerful read that shouldn't be missed"), Kirkus, and School Library Journal.

Tahereh Mafi just keeps getting better and better.
Her interweaving of personal and community pain from the aftermath of 9/11 on American Muslims is breathtaking.
Tahereh, please write a sequel to this gorgeous romantic drama!

Thank you so much Tahereh, HarperCollins and NetGalley for providing me with this digital ARC. I will definitely be buying my own copy of this book, to add to my collection of wonderful Mafi tomes.

I loved A Very Large Expanse of Sea, so I had high hopes for this one. While I think I preferred that work, this seems more full-grown and developed. The reader instantly feels for Shadi, and Mafi makes her trauma and its effects palpable. I appreciated the focus on more of the relationships between Muslim characters, rather than on the obvious difficulties she could have with non-Muslim characters. While that was still in the novel, it was much less prevalent than it might have been.

I believe it is an obvious fact of life that Tahereh Mafi is one of the most talented YA writers currently in the game. She has such a way with words—her prose is lyrical and emotive, quasi-stream of consciousness at times, rich and propulsive. An Emotion of Great Delight was my first book of Mafi’s outside of Shatter Me, and I am elated that she stepped beyond that world to expand into contemporary literature, to tell these heavy but very necessary stories about Muslim-American identity (while I haven’t read A Very Large Expanse of Sea (yet), I urge you to).

However, I feel a bit conflicted about this novel. While on the one hand it was a resonant, deeply-sad-yet-ultimately-hopeful “slice of life” story and, really, more character study than anything else, there were undoubtedly some hesitations I had with it. I am an agnostic White woman, so I can’t speak to the Muslim-American representation, the hijab representation, or the representation of Islam itself. Bearing that in mind, I will direct you to these few reviews from Muslim readers that speak to some of the book’s issues (the burqa line stood out as immediately and outright harmful—though I believe that the now-published version does not include it and Mafi issued a clarification). I encourage you to further seek reviews from Muslim readers.

But I do think that we cannot possibly expect all authors to be “correct” at all times, and I know that much of this story was infused with Mafi’s own experiences as a teenager growing up in the wake of 9/11. I hope we can be as receptive of her individual authorial presence in this story as we are critical of her shortcomings when it comes to how she represents Muslim identity on the page. Her Author’s Note at the beginning discusses how she hopes this novel can help reclaim multi-layered Muslim identity stories, and the novel touches explicitly on that too. This was a complicated, oft-contradictory, hard novel. I hope we can open up these conversations rather than shut them down, as calls for more complex and nuanced stories inherently invite in conversation about shortcomings and failures, too. No identity category is a monolith, nor experiences with it.

In terms of the story itself, I found it slim and stunning. Mafi’s poeticism shone through, and it was a powerful, profound, moving read. However, I felt very overwhelmed at times by the sheer amount of how much was going on—emotionally for Shadi, mainly. There was a lot going on in her life, and it was hard for a novel so slender to address everything adequately. The ending was very rushed and didn’t allow for much-needed breathing room. It could have used an extra chapter or two, and I’m unsure how I feel about it departing with the romance layer of the story rather than the family layer, which I felt was much more significant throughout the novel and needed greater attention by the end. It was very much an exploratory text, but not one that I felt reached true resolutions.

Overall, I have strikingly little to say about what actually happens in this story because I think it is a book that simply demands to be read. So much of its power exists on the page and invites you in for a journey, one I hope readers are willing to take in all its difficulties. There is much to be discovered here, and I look forward to more realistic fiction from Mafi, even if, as readers have pointed out, there’s also much to be wary of.

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC of An Emotion of Great Delight.

Unfortunately this is a DNF for me. I so appreciated the premise of this book. I want to explore race, class, religion and cultural issues. But I just could not sink my teeth into this. I barely knew what was going on half the time, it seemed to jump around too much, and too full of catty dialogue and feuding.

That's not to say that there weren't things that I didn't get out of it, and I still learned a bit about what it would be like to be a young Muslim, hijab wearing woman post 9/11. It was the actual story that I just couldn't get into.

Another incredible story from Mafi. Feels like a companion to "A Very Large Expanse of Sea". I love Mafi's writing and her characters are unique, yet relatable. I really enjoyed this story and the perspective of a Muslim teen after 9/11. I'm always interested to hear different points of view on historical events and Mafi does a wonderful job of informing her readers about who her characters are and what they are feeling. Her characters are relatable and lovely to read.

Could this novel be Taherah Mafi's best work? Yes, I believe so. An Emotion of Great Delight is tense, gripping, devastating, and real. The pain and promise experienced by each character, and by the reader, is so incredibly real.
If you've never read any of Mafi's works, you might not know that her prose is lyrical and honeyed, her characters rife with complicated emotional and physical lives.

An Emotion of Great Delight is a book, and Shadi a character, that will live in my head and heart for many, many years to come. This novel is easily the greatest work of fiction I have read so far in 2021, and I do not know how anything will top it.

Shadi is a high school senior living in America in 2003. She is a devout Muslim trying to smash her existence into the smallest package possible in order to avoid any form of attention: she needs to minimize herself and her emotions so that her mother has one less child to worry about after the death of Shadi's only brother; she needs to make herself and small and inconsequential so her best friend will consider her worthy; Shadi needs to not smile so much when she hopes her father won't survive his recent stint in the hospital; and most of all, Shadi needs to avoid her best friend's brother's heated glances as she'll die otherwise; most of all, Shadi needs to somehow stay true to her convictions regarding her faith and her community while America has shifted it's hostility and aimed it directly at Shadi and her people.

While there are multitudinous conflicts (sibling death, unbelievably tense and distraught homelife, self-harming mother, near-dead father, best friend breakup, in love with best friend's brother and trying to deny it, existing as the most hated minority at this time in American history, and not to mention Shadi's own shockingly difficult experience with her own mental health, the expectations of being a child of immigrants, the controversy inherent with maintaining her faith and wearing a hijab in public...) Mafi weaves them all together seamlessly as our protagonist, Shadi, quickly devolves and implodes. She's a girl on the edge with almost no one to see her silent cries for help.

This is not a novel to pass over, and I highly recommend it.

I am not sure how I feel about An Emotion of Great Delight. The writing was beautiful and conveyed the many strong emotions of the characters well. I was invested in the story--I wanted to know how all the complicated relationships worked out and how the characters moved past the pain, and then the book just....ended. I was also hoping for more of the story to be clearly set in the close aftermath of 9-11, and with a few short exceptions, nothing in the story was really reliant on 9-11 as a backdrop. Overall, I enjoyed the book and the way it was written but hoped for just a little bit more to be wrapped up with the story,

After I had my heart ripped out when I read A Very Large Expanse of Sea, I needed to give Tahreh Mafi's advertised heartbreaker a try. My takeaway? An Emotion of Great Delight benefits greatly from dropping the reader directly into Shadi's life at its worst. The events of 9/11 are clear in everyone's mind and deeply affect the Muslim communities that Shadi interacts with, setting an already anxious and disheartened tone for the story. The feeling of stress builds as we learn more about Shadi's personal experiences. Shadi is grieving the loss of her brother and ailing parents but she must still grow from failing relationships and difficult subjects at school. The feelings that Shadi goes through are rightfully dramatic, and with everything that she has on her plate, her urge to avoid further drama and conflict is relatable. After all, who would want to orchestrate an earthquake on brittle soil? I was amazed by Mafi's ability to write a full story with a satisfying ending when the story itself only covers a couple days.

Despite the clear trauma that the outside world has placed upon Shadi, I appreciated that the historical notes did not detract from the nuances of Shadi's struggle as a teenager. Shadi's Muslim identity was effortlessly woven in the narrative and yet was not used as a mechanism for pity. Shadi instead grappled with her faith after repeated trauma, and questioned her ability to trust others as a result of the discrimination she faced over the past year. Shadi's personal issues and the crux of the story wasn't about 9/11. It was about whether or not Shadi should give a friend the opportunity for a romantic relationship, or force herself to remain at her current social status quo. While external factors such as her family posed challenges for Shadi, at the end of the day, this novel is about Shadi's own growth. Shadi shines in this story, even when she feels she's about to break. She's allowed to solve her own issues, even as the world and others have their own to figure out.