Internment

Ahmed (Love, Hate & Other Filters) sets her chilling novel in the very near future: two-and-a-half years after an election that brought about a Muslim ban, Exclusion laws, and the internment of Muslims in a disturbing echo of the Japanese internments of the 1940s. Layla Amin, the rebellious 17-year-old Muslim narrator, is enraged by the changes that her small liberal California community accepts: curfews, book burnings, required viewing of the U.S. president's weekly National Security Address. On a personal level, she was suspended from school for kissing her non-Muslim boyfriend in public, and her poet-professor father has lost his job. Still, her family's abrupt nighttime "relocation" to a camp--during which each arrival is branded with ultraviolet identification encoding--is a shock. While her parents shrink into compliance, Layla quickly makes friends and allies who band together to bring public attention to internees' treatment, close down the camps, and put an end to the country's fascism and Islamophobia. Ahmed keeps the tension mounting as Layla faces increasingly violent consequences for her actions; the teenagers' relationships are depicted authentically, and their strength and resistance are inspiring. An unsettling and important book for our times. Ages 12-up. Agent: Eric Smith, P.S. Literary Agency. (Mar.)

Gr 8 Up--"Exclusion laws" imposed by an Islamophobic president have upended the lives of Muslims across the United States, including Layla's. Removed from school for her own good by her parents, Layla circumvents state-imposed curfews to see her boyfriend, David, who is Jewish. When she and her family and other Muslims are rounded up by the authorities and forced to live in an internment camp in the California desert, Layla learns what it means to survive--and to fight. This cautionary tale for our times draws parallels between the situation Muslim Americans face today and the horrors of the Japanese American internment.