I really enjoyed reading this book, and it definitely hits hard. The author does a good job of separating the three different narrator's voices, and I really like how well she portrays the ways that the intersectionality of their identities play out in both different ways for each girl, while they all still have the same underlying feelings, and a common thread throughout their experiences. 10/10, would recommend.

I loved You Truly Assumed. I think this book speaks to everything that is good about teens that want to change the world and are activists for the causes they believe in.

After a terrorist attack in DC, a Black Muslim teen ballerina posts her thoughts online about how she feels about her identity and her place in the world, her post goes viral, and she begins a blog called "You Truly Assumed." Through this online space, she has the opportunity to give Muslim female teens a place to vent and find likeminded individuals. She finds two other teens, an artist and a coder, both of which are also Black Muslim teens, and together the three of them work to make You Truly Assumed the best it can be.

And while there is a lot of positivity happening online, there is also a lot of negativity. The girls begin getting threats, and when one particular threat hits a little too close to home, they have to decide if they are going to continue the important work they're doing, or if they need to step back.

I was truly impressed with this book. The writing was beautiful, and I loved getting to know these incredible girls. I think their passion and willingness to stand up for their beliefs highlights the strengths of the teens I know in real life. This book was an important piece of realistic fiction, and I have been recommending it to school groups and teens from middle school and up.

This book right here is my FAVORITE book of 2022! Having three different views of how the attack affected them was beautiful! I fell in love with the major and minor characters so much that I had to read the book for a second time as well as buy the hard book! Great first book from Laila!

This book did a really good job showing how microaggressions are everyday occurrences that don't necessarily shock those who receive them because they've become so commonplace. I loved seeing quotes from the Quran and mentions of faith woven throughout, and there were some great teen-adult discussions, especially between Farah and her mom.

Unfortunately its many good qualities weren't strong enough to overshadow the book's narrative problems. There were some noticeable inconsistencies with continuity within individual sections. While the teen-adult discussions were good, the language was often stilted and unnatural. Most noticeably, the girls say how important YTA is to them and how it's had such a great influence in their lives, but we don't see the evidence to support this claim. The end says the blog was built and sustained by friendship, but apart from very short bursts of texts and chats, we didn't get to see the development of this friendship. Additionally, the end says YTA's followers have "put so much love and strength" into the community, but unfortunately those contributions also weren't well-developed. If the connection between the three girls were stronger, and also their interactions with their readers, it would have made for a stronger read.

You Truly Assumed was a great read! It was eye opening, focused on intersectionality, and overall a lovely SJ oriented read. I found the Audi version of the book a littler difficult to follow, but devoured the print/ebook edition. I will definitely keep a copy of this book on my classroom bookshelf and recommend it to students!

It took me a while to get to reading this and I regret not reading it sooner! It's a fantastic book about the intersectionality of being Black, muslim, and a woman and how those identities face oppression. Definitely give it a read.

This is such a brilliant read with the most lovely form of representation. This is the type of read that every person should read at least once in their life.

Thank you Inkyard Press & #NetGalley for giving me a copy of You Truly Assumed in exchange for my honest thoughts!

CW: Islamophobia, racial microaggressions

3 stars

You Truly Assumed is a debut YA novel that the lives of three Black Muslim girls over the period of a summer as they grapple with the aftermath of a terrorist attack in Washington, DC, where the attacker is assumed to be Muslim due to their name. The girls come together to run a blog to work through their complex feelings about Islamophobia and racism in the aftermath of the attack, as well as to create a safe space and a community for other girls who identify with their experiences. This is a coming of age book, as we follow each characters unique experiences with growing up and approaching their final year of high school and future college plans, navigating family dynamics and young love, and dealing with Islamophobia and racism in both in person and online. Sabreen centres her story on the importance of sharing your voice and the power of a supportive community. She also draws attention to the quickness of the white population to make harmful assumptions about people based on their race, religion, and names, and stereotyping and targeting entire communities because of one individual.

I really liked how Sabriya, Zakat, and Farah came from unique backgrounds and were united in their desire to create a community for other Black Muslim girls and to combat Islamophobia. I wish that their connection was explored more deeply beyond simply being told about how strong their friendship was - there was little interaction between the main characters beyond a few texts and calls about the blog, but their support for one another did ring true. While the book felt a bit 2 dimensional at times, the story it explored was nuanced and empowering.

Quotes I wrote down:
"I'm constantly aware of my existence, my being, being politicized. As a Black Muslim young woman, I've gotten used to having all three identities politicized. Or having others try to separate the three and try to act like one is central to my existence. I used to try to do the same, until I realized it was impossible. I'm Black and Muslim and a young woman." (p 116)

"It's scary that names can speak for someone before they're given the chance to even open their mouth. Names can decide between who lives and dies. Between who can live in peace and who has to live in fear. Between those who can tell their own story and those whose stories are assumed before they can pick up the pen." (p 39)

I am grateful that I received an early arc for this book. Sabriya, Zakat, and Farah stories are really are very well developed characters, following their journey tackling islamophobia, racism, online harassments. I would highly recommend this book, want more and more people to read this!

FIRST IMPRESSION:

I jumped at the chance to read You Truly Assumed because of the hype it received pre-publication. I had quite a few friends read ARCs of this book and rave about how much they liked it, so I was pretty excited about the chance I got myself! I was also curious about how this book would explore blogging as a means of making a change since I myself obviously blog on here. Though I got busy and overshot my blog tour stop by several days, I am still glad I made it!

THE STORY:

You Truly Assumed follows the story of Sabriya, Zakat and Farah as they maneuver their lives around the after-effects of a terrorist attack in DC. Sabriya expresses herself through her dancing but uses an online journal to work out her feelings after the attack, which mistakenly gets published online and becomes the blog named You Truly Assumed.

Zakat is trying her best to feel safe in her community at Lullwood, but is horrified when Islamophobic attacks take place in her safe neighbourhood. Farah is figuring out her place in her absentee dad’s new family while trying to engage with the community to help fight prejudice. These two girls stumble across You Truly Assumed and end up part of the admin group as they attempt to help Black Muslim girls across the country find their place.

But things get heated when the girls face challenges within their community as well as on their online safe space.

THE CHARACTERS:

Sabriya, Farah and Zakat were an amazing trio of friends who come together from four different corners of the country to put together their blog. These three working together, Zoom-calling each other really made me wanna get some amazing co-bloggers to help me out here too! LOL!

My favourite thing about these three is that they had their own individual lives and experiences with racism and the aftermath of the terrorist attack. I really liked the individual character arcs and that their friendship was mostly based on them catching up on each other’s lives.

THE WRITING:

I really liked that the author used three different POVs for its main characters. Each character had their own distinct voice and their personalities were very different.

The only thing that threw me off was that I felt the writing could get a little too detailed at times. Rather than showing what happened or what some was feeling, I found that there were many instances where the author was telling it to the reader. This didn’t really put me off the story but it’s a personal pet peeve that annoys me sometimes.

THE PLOT:

I really liked how one event sets off three different experiences for the three girls. This was an excellent way to highlight how traumatic events can affect everyone in different ways. My favourite thing about this was that while one person has a particularly confrontative experience, someone else would be having a passive-aggressive experience involving friends or family.

Though I don’t identify as Muslim or as a Black person, there were so many instances that had me cheering on these girls or getting frustrated at the racism and Islamophobia they experienced throughout the span of their story. I think almost everyone will find an experience here that they themselves or someone they know could relate to!

THE REPRESENTATION:

Once again, because I am not Muslim or Black, I cannot comment on the reliability of the representation. But the three main characters are teenage Black Muslim girls with a host of supporting characters. There are many instances of racism and Islamophobia that readers would find relatable or have heard of from their friends and family.

FINAL VERDICT:

You Truly Assumed by Laila Sabreen is an eye-opening and beautiful look at the impact of a terrorist attack on three different Black Muslim girls. With three different voices living three different lives, this young-adult book takes the reader through an emotional journey of both healing and growth. Inspiring and raw, You Truly Assumed is a read that is important in this day and age.

This book was about the events after a bombing in Washington DC. The bomber had a Muslim sounding name which evoked racism agains Muslims across the country. Four young Muslim girls started a blog to speak their truth, but they had to take it down when they received personal threats and were hacked. This is a touching story about self-realization and strength. I highly recommend it to middle and high school libraries. Thank you for the advanced copy!

First Impressions: Loving the intersectionality of this writing.

Three Black Muslim girls start a blog that goes viral after a recent terrosist attack was assumed to be Muslim by his name. Sabriya (who goes by Bri on the blog) begins You Truly Assumed (YTA) As a private online journal to express her feelings after the recent rise in islamophobic things happening after the attack. After she realizes it was accidentally public and other Muslim girls of color resonate with her words. Soon Zakat (who goes by Kat on the blog) is working on the icon & drawings for the blog & Farah (who goes by Rose on the blog) works on the coding & website design. I really loved this book and how clearly and seamlessly Sabreen is able to express intersectionality. All three MC’s are Black, Muslim & Girls none of those identities can be seperated but that doesn’t stop society from trying. I also really appreciated the realistic way Sabreen talks about Islam; Americans/ non Muslims tend to think of islam as an “unchanging and oppressive”. However just with all religions the interpretation of the holy texts change slightly over time. As more women and non male scholars gain respect in the field, changes can be and are made. For example when Zakat’s Masjid removed the gendered entrances as it alienated a part of their community and they even added a third prayer room for people who don’t find themselves fitting into binary genders. That truly warmed my heart to read and I’ve only read about things like this in college as an outsider of the religion.

This is an amazing book for Black Muslim Representation & and introduction to intersectional oppression and how difficult it is to Experience Anti-Blackness, Islamaophobia & Misogny all at once.

I really loved this book!

The characters were great, the writing was engaging, and it felt (at times unfortunately) so relatable. Heartfelt, thoughtful, tender, and lovely - reading this book felt a bit like a love letter to my community, and i’m so grateful for it!

I can’t wait for more from Laila Sabreen.

How many times has tragic news broke and you wished the terrorist was not a brown person? That the victim was not a black person? That the nation will not point a finger at an entire religion? Too many for me to count. I am not alone in this thinking. When a terrorist attack hits the mainstream news, the first name is a common Arabic name. But it doesn't necessarily mean they're Muslim. Nonetheless, Islamophobia grows.

Sabriya turns to her online journal for comfort. You Truly Assumed was meant to be a private blog but soon turns into a public online safe space for Muslim teens. Soon Zakat and Farah join Sabriya in making the blog a successful community. The popularity grows along with their friendship. But with viral success comes hateful comments. The girls must decide whether to shut the blog down or make their voices heard louder than ever before.

Laila Sabreen has written such a thought-provoking motivational debut novel for young adults, especially Black Muslim girls. As a 40-year-old Black female blogger, I could personally relate. The themes explore the sentiment of minorities that our dreams don't matter; that we are all alike. As the author states in her note, we are out here! Represent proudly and recommend this book to the minority young adult in your life. You Truly Assumed is social justice fiction done right!

Happy Pub Day, Laila Sabreen! You Truly Assumed is now available.

Disclaimer: An advance copy was received directly from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Opinions are my own and would be the same if I spent my hard-earned coins.

~LiteraryMarie

You Truly Assumed is told from the perspectives of three unique young black Muslim women. At the open of the book, there is a terrorist attack in Washington, DC, where the terrorist is presumed to be Muslim based soley on his name. Sabriya, Zakat, and Farrah live in different part of the country, have different socioeconomic backgrounds, and family dynamics. We follow the individual journeys of these three young women as they navigate society in the aftermath. Their worlds intersect once Sabriya posts an online journal entry expressing her feelings--but little did she realize that it wasn't a private entry, but a public blog. The three young women work together on the blog to be a safe space for other young Muslim women to interact, though the comments with hate continue to increase. A few bumps happened along the way, but over the course of a few week, Sabriya, Zakat and Farrah grew immensely as people.
While I couldn't identify with their voices on a personal level, the message of standing up for things you believe in and show your support, really resonated with me.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read an ARC of You Truly Assumed!

I really wanted to love this one, since the premise is so interesting. This is the story of three Black Muslim girls, Sabriya, Zakat, and Farah, who meet through a blog that Sabriya starts in the wake of a terrorist attack in Washington, DC. The three girls live in different parts of the country but find that they are experiencing many of the same issues with hatred and discrimination, especially as most people assume the perpetrator of the attack is Muslim because he has a Muslim-sounding name. I really enjoyed learning about the Black Muslim community through the eyes of these girls, and I liked the way that the discrimination and bigotry were handled in the book.

However, I found the execution of the story itself to be lacking. While the girls experienced different challenges throughout the book, I felt that there wasn't really enough depth to the plot to carry a whole novel. I also found the characters themselves to be somewhat one-dimensional, and their friendship didn't totally make sense to me either. I would have liked to see more scenes of the girls interacting with each other and developing a deeper friendship, rather than being told that they all became close without actually seeing it. I'd also have loved to see more of the content of Sabriya's blog, especially some more of the images and designs that are discussed throughout the book.

Overall, I think this book makes some very crucial points, but it could have been executed a bit better.

2.5 stars

I’m calling it now: this book is going to be on my Most Disappointing Books of 2022 list. I should have expected it when I saw it compared to Love, Hate & Other Filters, but I had hope it would be better. I was wrong.

In the interests of fairness: there were moments of value. The Black Muslim experience is so rarely represented in any media, and the book definitely had some powerful things to say about the intersectionality of being a Black Muslim girl (even if the Muslim part was questionable – see below). The emotions that the girls feel in relation to the Islamophobia was also painfully relatable – I felt like the anger and hopelessness was well expressed, as well as the way it affects a community.

But, all of that is outweighed by the messiness of everything else. In terms of technical craft, it read like a first draft. I don’t want to be too critical, since it was an ARC and I want to believe that some of those issues might have been fixed in the final publication, but the version I read was full of grammatical errors, and structural issues and inconsistencies. Something would happen in one perspective, then we’d cut to the next chapter/perspective and it wouldn’t have happened yet (and more often than not it happened again in the second perspective, in a different way than the first time), which meant I just couldn’t keep track of the timeline or plot half the time.

The pacing was also off. I’d originally assumed that the three girls were already friends before the start of the book and decided to start a blog together, but that’s not the case – they all meet each other through the blog and become friends later, because of it. Except… we never get any of that. Bri starts the blog, Zakat and Farah volunteer to help with it, and then suddenly they’re all best friends who understand each other better than anyone else – but we never actually see their friendship developing, so I never bought into it or felt emotionally invested in it. All three girls’ stories also felt totally disconnected, and any of them could have been a full novel all on its own, so having to fit in all three made them all feel underdeveloped.

But all of that pales in comparison to the major problem: the almost complete absence of Muslim representation. I’m not Black, so I can’t speak to that specific intersection, but faith should be faith regardless of race, and this book had none. Zakat wears hijab, and prays salah (the ritual daily prayers) exactly once, and there were occasional mentions of Allah in her and Bri’s chapters, but Farah’s POV in particular had absolutely nothing until she explicitly states “I’m Muslim” at the 59% mark.

2022 is the year I stop settling for crumbs when it comes to Muslim representation, and vague mentions and an Allah necklace aren’t enough if the representation doesn’t come through in the characters’ actions too. For instance, the romance (which wasn’t the only offender, but was one of the biggest): two of the girls had boyfriends, with whom they had the kind of emotional and physical relationship you would see in any non-religious YA contemporary, with nary even a vague allusion to the fact that that’s so deeply disallowed in Islam. It’s also unclear whether one of the boyfriends is Muslim or not – I guess ‘Muslim girl falls for Black boy of ambiguous faith’ is better than ‘Muslim girl falls for generic, white non-Muslim boy’, but not by a lot!

So, all in all, a disappointment. The positive reviews all talk about how great the portrayal of Islamophobia is, which is all fine and good, but at this point that’s not enough for me: I need my characters to actually be practicing Muslims too, and on that front this book did not deliver.

CW: racism; Islamophobia; microaggressions; online harassment

Sabriya, Farrah, and Zakat are very different. Sabriya is training to be a professional ballerinas, Zakat is an artist hoping to get into a good college, and Farrah love computer science and programming. The one thing they all have in common, they are all Young Female Black Muslims.

When a terrorist attack hits Washington DC, and the Muslim faith is attacked, Sabriya does the only thing she knows what to do. She writes about it. Starting a public blog was not her original intention, but once she gains the help of Zakat and Farrah the blog “You Truly Assumed” or YTA begins to blow up.

YTA is gaining immense attention, and not all of it is good. As the girls struggle through the hateful comments constantly ringing through their blog, they must decide how far they are willing to go to make their voices heard.

“You truly assumed that the world would heal and stay healthy while spinning constantly. A spinning driven in part by accepted half-truths and rumors that get taken as facts.”

I feel like the three girls were very well written, we are given enough about their backstory, and current situation to really understand them. I love that these girls were able to find each other even spread across the whole country and give each other support and solidarity through a very difficult time.

This book discusses very important topics and is written so beautifully. I think this is a great one to get into the hands of our youth, with so many important lessons to be learned.

This one published February 8, 2022 so be sure to check it out now! Thank you so much @netgalley and @inkyardpress for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This book had me feeling some type of way! This is the kinds of representation that we need! My heart feels so full reading about three young black Muslim women! It’s all about coming together and creating a space safe and family and community. It’s powerful and just so relatable that as a Muslim myself so much resonated with me that I felt seen! Just amazing!

I definitely enjoyed this one but it didn't stand out for me. I wasn't immediately captured and didn't feel like I could connect with the plot in general. I think I may need to give this a re-read later.