American Dervish
Books | Fiction / Family Life / General
3.9
Ayad Akhtar
From the author of Homeland Elegies and Pulitzer Prize winner Disgraced, a stirring and explosive novel about an American Muslim family in Wisconsin struggling with faith and belonging in the pre-9/11 world. Hayat Shah is a young American in love for the first time. His normal life of school, baseball, and video games had previously been distinguished only by his Pakistani heritage and by the frequent chill between his parents, who fight over things he is too young to understand. Then Mina arrives, and everything changes.American Dervish is a brilliantly written, nuanced, and emotionally forceful look inside the interplay of religion and modern life.
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More Details:
Author
Ayad Akhtar
Pages
384
Publisher
Little, Brown
Published Date
2012-01-09
ISBN
0316192821 9780316192828
Ratings
Google: 4
Community ReviewsSee all
"This book was very well written... You follow the lives of many characters on their spiritual journey... It is also a hard read because of the painful journey it was for these characters...."
J w
Jfly winslow
"Deeply upsetting, brutal assault of a book. Although I don't expect every character in a novel to be "likable" or even "relatable", I lose patience when every single character is an idiot, an asshole or both. Neither of the 2 protagonists; glutton-for-punishment wack job Mina or obscenely self absorbed Hayat made sense to me, and the secondary figures veered into caricature. I found it especially difficult to believe that Nathan, a well-educated Jewish doctor and the child of Holocaust survivors, would so blithely decide to convert to Islam and then be SHOCKED to discover that hard core fundamentalist Muslims might be anti-Semitic. (Wow, never saw THAT coming!) No one comes off well here: devout Muslims, Jews, secularists...even the little kid is an obnoxious brat. Akhtar claims to dramatize the "personal mystical exploration of faith" and the "need for a feminine spirituality within the Islamic tradition", but all he does is suggest that spirituality turns women into punching bags who gratefully accept being "ground into dust" for the glory of God."
Lesley Williams