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A review by ihateprozac
Love, Hate & Other Filters by Samira Ahmed
3.0
CW: Islamophobia and Islamophobic hate crimes
This book didn’t know whether it wanted to be a fluffy contemporary or a hard-hitting contemporary and it suffered for that.
The first act reads as a fluffy contemporary, focusing on Maya’s struggles to reconcile her conservative Muslim family with her dreams of studying filmmaking and dating a white boy. The second act tries to be an examination of Islamophobia and racial profiling following a terrorist attack. And the third act struggles to reconcile any of those things into one cohesive narrative.
The romance and Maya’s internal struggles are well-written. The Islamophobic violence and harassment is well-written. It’s just a shame that these threads feel like someone randomly spliced two books together in Microsoft Word.
It says a lot that a <300 page contemporary took me over a month to finish. It was forgettable and I was more emotional about a minor character’s tragic story rather than anything the main character did.
Neither of Samira Ahmed’s books went where I wanted them to go, but I will still continue to pick things up by this author.
Representation: Indian-American Muslim MC
This book didn’t know whether it wanted to be a fluffy contemporary or a hard-hitting contemporary and it suffered for that.
The first act reads as a fluffy contemporary, focusing on Maya’s struggles to reconcile her conservative Muslim family with her dreams of studying filmmaking and dating a white boy. The second act tries to be an examination of Islamophobia and racial profiling following a terrorist attack. And the third act struggles to reconcile any of those things into one cohesive narrative.
The romance and Maya’s internal struggles are well-written. The Islamophobic violence and harassment is well-written. It’s just a shame that these threads feel like someone randomly spliced two books together in Microsoft Word.
It says a lot that a <300 page contemporary took me over a month to finish. It was forgettable and I was more emotional about a minor character’s tragic story rather than anything the main character did.
Neither of Samira Ahmed’s books went where I wanted them to go, but I will still continue to pick things up by this author.
Representation: Indian-American Muslim MC