Summary (from the publisher):Allie Abraham has it all going for her—she’s a 
straight-A student, with good friends and a close-knit family, and she’s dating cute, popular, and sweet Wells Henderson. One problem: Wells’s father is Jack Henderson, America’s most famous conservative shock jock…and Allie hasn’t told Wells that her family is Muslim. It’s not like Allie’s religion is a secret, exactly. It’s just that her parents don’t practice and raised her to keep her Islamic heritage to herself. But as Allie witnesses ever-growing Islamophobia in her small town and across the nation, she begins to embrace her faith—studying it, practicing it, and facing hatred and misunderstanding for it. Who is Allie, if she sheds the façade of the “perfect” all-American girl? What does it mean to be a “Good Muslim?” And can a Muslim girl in America ever truly fit in?
My Rating: 4.5/5 Stars
My Thoughts:
It’s safe to say that we’ve all read books that we’d know we love from the get-go. But I think what’s even better than that feeling sometimes is when you pick up a book and it transforms from something you think you’d enjoy to something that you absolutely love. Enter Nadine Jolie Courtney’s upcoming release All-American Muslim Girl, a book that I all of a sudden couldn’t part ways from. This book so would’ve been a binge read for me if my first full draft of my senior English research paper hadn’t been due the same week. Luckily for me, I was still able to eat it up over the course of three sittings.
All-American Muslim Girl follows high school sophomore Allie, who on the outside appears to be your average American girl. She has red hair and a white complexion, a great relationship with her parents, good grades, and a budding relationship with the cutest boy in the school. What most people don’t realize about Allie is that she is Muslim. Since her parents don’t practice and tend to keep Allie away from faith, Allie doesn’t think her secret is too big of a deal. However, as Allie witnesses Islamophobia more and more, including from her boyfriend’s dad, she wants to learn about her faith and finds herself practicing and studying it while trying to understand the hatred and misunderstanding.
I admit that it took me the first seventy pages or so to fully get into All-American Muslim Girl. Allie talks to her mom about what it was like for her when she decided to convert to Islam when she married Allie’s dad and why the two don’t really practice religion. It was Allie’s interest in learning more about her faith that really gets the plot going on. Allie decides to practice and makes many discoveries about her religion, her family, the way people treat her, and most importantly, herself. It’s been a while since I read a book that involved religion so much. It was really refreshing to see Allie transform from someone who feared about outsiders learning about her background to someone who freely practices and has much reverence for her religion.
Fangirl Fury 