From The Bookshelves: American Dervish by Ayad Akhtar

About a year ago, I won a copy of Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish at the Biennial Emerging Immigration Scholars Conference. Score.

This summer, I read it. And now I commend it to you.

On Amazon, the publisher’s blurb is shockingly brief:

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.

I suppose that might be an accurate description, except Mina arrives on page 33 of a 352 page book. So this run-up blurb is shockingly inapt. 

I’d say this a coming of age story of a young man grappling with his personal relationship with religion, a quest that is inextricably linked to stories of immigration.

-KitJ