The Button Box
by Fawzia Gilani-Williams and Bridget Hodder, illustrated by Harshad Marathe
Kar-Ben/Lerner
An #OwnVoices story cowritten by a Jewish author and a Muslim author, featuring a pair of best friends―one Jewish and one Muslim―going back in time to learn about their shared past
After Jewish fifth-grader Ava and her Muslim best friend Nadeem are called hateful names at school, Ava’s Granny Buena rummages in her closet and pulls out a glittering crystal button box. It’s packed with buttons that generations of Ava’s Sephardic ancestors have cherished. With the help of Granny’s mysterious cat Sheba, Ava and Nadeem discover that a button from the button box will take them back in time. Suddenly, they are in ancient Morocco, where Nadeem’s ancestor, Prince Abdur Rahman, is running for his life. Can Ava and Nadeem help the prince escape to Spain and fulfill his destiny, creating a legendary Golden Age for Muslims, Jews and Christians?
Summary and cover image via Edelweiss
Thunderbird : Book One
by Sonia Nimr, translated by M. Lynx Qualey
Center for Middle Eastern Studies at University of Texas-Austin / University of Texas Press
The Thunderbird trilogy is a fast-paced time-traveling fantasy adventure centered on Noor, a young orphaned Palestinian girl who starts in the present and must go back in time to get four magical bird feathers and save the world. Aided by a djinn cat and girls who look identical to Noor and who each have one of the bird’s powers, in this initial volume Noor begins her journey through different historical periods, striving to keep the wall between worlds intact.
Summary and cover image via Edelweiss
Chef Yasmina and the Potato Panic by Wauter Mannaert
Macmillan/First Second
In this silly, action-packed graphic novel from Wauter Mannaert, Chef Yasmina and the Potato Panic, a young chef is the only one who can protect her town from an onslaught of scientifically enhanced, highly addictive potatoes.
Yasmina isn’t like the other kids in her city. Maybe it’s the big chef hat she wears. Or the fact that she stuffs her dad’s lunchbox full of spring rolls instead of peanut butter and jelly. She might be an oddball, but no one can deny that Yasmina has a flair for food. All she needs to whip up a gourmet meal is a recipe from her cookbook and fresh vegetable form the community garden.
But everything changes when the garden is bulldozed and replaced with a strange new crop of potatoes. Her neighbors can’t get enough of these spuds! And after just one bite their behavior changes—they slobber, chase cats, and howl at the moon. What’s the secret ingredient in these potatoes that has everyone acting like a bunch of crazed canines? Yasmina needs to find a cure, and fast!
Cover image and summary via Macmillan
This review was originally published in the November/December issue of Horn Book magazine and can also be found on the Horn Book website.
I Hope You Get This Message
by Farah Naz Rishi
High School HarperTeen 420 pp. g
10/19 978-0-06-274145-5 $17.99
e-book ed. 978-0-06-274147-9 $9.99
When the world learns that omnipotent aliens will decide humanity’s fate in eight days, chaos erupts, and three teens strive to make their (potentially) final days count. Cate is charged by her mother, who has schizophrenia, to find the father who abandoned them — and who her mother believes is an alien. Adeem, an amateur hacker, searches for his sister, estranged from their Pakistani American Muslim family after she came out as a lesbian. Crossing paths in Reno, Cate and Adeem head to Roswell, where Jesse, the third teen, is convincing desperate people that he can (for a fee) transmit their pleas for salvation to the aliens, using a machine created by his now-deceased ne’er-do-well father. Rishi’s debut novel skillfully addresses complex contemporary issues on both the global (environmental damage, war, greed) and personal (identity, mental health) scales. It also tackles prejudice and the ways existential fatalism can inordinately affect marginalized people. But even given these themes and the novel’s dark story line, Rishi ends on a hopeful note of possibility, using an adapted quote from Rumi: “Your pain is where the light enters you.”
From the November/December 2019 Horn Book Magazine.