Jameela Green Ruins Everything

October 1, 2021

Following some attention-getting short stories, Ali's Good Intentions features a young British Pakistani man named Nur who must break it to his family on New Year's Eve that the woman he truly loves isn't Pakistani but Black (60,000-copy first printing). Set in Trinidad and Tobago, Banwo's When We Were Birds brings together Yejide, raised in a Port Angeles house built on the remains of a plantation whose owners enslaved her ancestors and left unprepared by her mother for her task in life--ferrying the city's souls into the afterlife--and Darwin, who must disregard the religious commandments of his true-believing Rastafarian mother and accept the only job he can find: that of grave digger. Stuck on her dissertation about the late canonical poet Xiao-Wen Chou, Taiwanese American Ingrid Yang follows down a mysterious archival reference in Chou's Disorientation and ends up acknowledging her anger with academia and white institutions generally. Following up Clark's own questions about the children of victims of Argentina's Dirty War in the 1970s, On a Night of a Thousand Stars features Paloma, an Argentine diplomat's college-age daughter, whose probing questions about her father's involvement in the military dictatorship put her family, her sense of self, and her very life in danger (30,000-copy first printing). In Friedman's Here Lies, climate change-mauled 2040s Louisiana requires cremation rather than burial at death, and Alma fights to reclaim her mother's ashes for a final journey. Cofounder of the Lit Camp Writers Conference, Kravetz reimagines events surrounding the composition of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar in The Last Confessions of Sylvia P., which are related from the perspectives of Plath's psychiatrist, a nasty rival poet, and a curator years later (100,000-copy first printing). A Canadian film and television producer (she's responsible for the hit CBC series Little Mosque on the Prairie), Nawaz crafts the story of a feckless young woman whose new imam expects better of her, and though there's the risk that Jameela Green Ruins Everything, she is on the case in an absurdist sort of way when he disappears. In Ronan's Chevy's in the Hole, a white man struggling to kick his drug habit and a Black woman working as an urban farmer try to make a go of it together in Flint, MI, as the water is becoming poisoned, with family histories woven in (50,000-copy first printing). In Stringfellow's Memphis, ten-year-old Joan flees her father's violence with her mother and sister to the house built in the historic Black district of Memphis by her grandfather, who was lynched only days after becoming the city's first Black detective.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2022
A woman makes a deal with God to make her memoir a bestseller--and ends up getting much more than she bargained for. Jameela Green is excited for her publicity tour...until her high school nemesis shows up and steals her thunder. It seems like these sorts of things are always happening in her life, so for the first time in more than 20 years, Jameela ventures to her local mosque in Liverspot, North Dakota. There, she meets Ibrahim, an earnest imam who recommends that she try to help someone else before she expects God's help in return--specifically, he says that she should reach out to a homeless person. Thus, Ibrahim and Jameela encounter Barkley--who, it turns out, has been radicalized by an IS-type group known as the Dominion of the Islamic Caliphate and Kingdom, which will conveniently be referred to as the DICK throughout the rest of the novel. And DICK jokes really are the tip of the iceberg. Soon, Ibrahim is detained by the CIA, suspected of associations with the DICK, and when Jameela tries to help him, she ends up in Pakistan, tasked with infiltrating the DICK, which has been looking for a Western-raised Muslim woman to commit a terrorist act. Along the way, she commits murder and is promised in marriage to the DICK's second-in-command, who has a fetish for women eating cookies, while Ibrahim's CIA contact--also his fake wife, as a cover--turns out to be the daughter of the DICK's leader. They all end up in Syria along with Jameela's White husband and their daughter, where they are part of the strangest wedding ever staged. There is little subtlety in this farcical novel, but the over-the-top satire still wields a sharp edge, particularly when it comes to commentary on American involvement in the Middle East. Jameela wins us over with her sharp tongue, boundless courage, and sterling insight.

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