Written by Adiba Jaigirdar
Target Age Group: Grades 8-12
Nishat is a Bangladeshi teen living in Dublin who comes out to her family as a lesbian. She enters into a business competition in school where she starts doing henna, but her plan is copied by two other students. Through rumors, romance, and fierce competition, the book discusses cultural appropriation, racism, and homophobia as Nishat learns to embrace every aspect of her identity.
I am reviewing this book in the LGBTQ category. This book was a selection for the YALSA's Best Fiction for Young Adults list in 2021, which recommends books for ages 12 to 18 to libraries who can use the list for guidance on collections and reader’s advisories. The book was also on Time Magazine’s list of 100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time.
For this review, I will be evaluating language, symbolism, and setting.
The book combines is written in English, but it uses Bengali words where the main character would use them in her speaking, which contributes to the immersion into Nishat’s cultural identity. Her younger sister calls her “Apujan” which is a combined term of respect and endearment for an older sister. Nishat’s narration speaks of different foods, conversational Bengali words, and expressions without direct translations to English, and the choice to keep these words in Bengali without providing explicit translations for each word as it comes up is a strong choice by the author to provide authenticity to Nishat’s experiences. At the beginning of the book, Nishat says she had to look up the translation for lesbian in Bengali, because it is not a word that she has been introduced to despite growing up speaking the language, and this experience mirrors how her parents reacted when she came out to them, because the idea of having a lesbian daughter was as foreign to them as the words were to Nishat. She also had her name mispronounced several times, and each incident became increasingly offensive to me as someone whose name gets mispronounced equally as often.
Nishat’s identity is rooted deeply in the culture of her parents and her childhood in Bangladesh, but she is growing up in Ireland at a school where she is required to learn Irish and to speak in English. Food is used as a symbol of individuality and belonging in the book. Nishat experiences people disliking the smell of her lunch when her mother packs her Bangladeshi food, and one of her classmates starting rumors about how her father’s restaurant gives people indigestion, but those experiences are paralleled by her love of her cultural food. She explains how she loves breakfasts over summer break when she has time to sit down and eat traditional Bangladeshi food instead of cereal, and how she goes to her cousin’s wedding and they serve Indian food but she has to use Western cutlery to eat it instead of using her hands, making her feel out of place at an event that is supposed to be for people like her. At the end of the book when she invites Flávia to her house, Nishat’s mother, after spending most of the book seemingly ignoring her daughter out of shame for her identity as a lesbian, makes a fuss over cooking a lot of Bengali food for the girls, showing how she has grown to accept Nishat and the possibility of her having a girlfriend instead of a boyfriend.
The book takes place in Dublin, Ireland, which informs Nishat’s experiences integrating her Bangladeshi culture with the culture of her peers. Dublin is a major city center, and larger cities are usually less culturally conservative than smaller towns, but Nishat attends a Catholic all girls school, and Catholicism is a religion notorious for valuing shame. This means that when Nishat is outed to her school, she does not feel like she can stand up for herself. Dublin also does not have a large minority population, and she is one of a few non-white students in her grade at school. She experiences both casual and intentional racism and homophobia, but then in the end she is able to stand out on the street and kiss a girl and no one stops to pay attention to them. The setting provides that space for interpersonal relationships in Nishat’s life to be extremely influential, but also allows see that there are people outside her current social network who will be excited to meet her eventually.
Sharing so many aspects of my identity with Nishat, I strongly connected to this story, which is likely why it took me so long to read it despite owning it and intending to read it since the week it was released. I think the journey Nishat goes through with her parents was dramatic, but not unlike my experience coming out to my mother. I had already comfortably found a group of accepting friends before I understood my identity, so I did not experience any of the homophobia Nishat did at school, but my heart broke for her over and over. For these reasons, it’s hard for me to provide a rating, because the negative aspects of Nishat’s experiences hit me so much harder than the positive ones. I would definitely recommend the book to, as the book’s dedication suggests, “queer brown girls” (Jaigirdar, 2020).
Jaigirdar, A. (2020). The Henna Wars. Page Street Publishing.
YALSA. (2017, December). Best Fiction for Young Adults. https://www.ala.org/yalsa/best-fiction-young-adults
