From The Bookshelves: American Fever by Dur e Aziz Amna

Weekends are for reading. Oh, who am I kidding. Reading is for every single moment of the day that is not required to be spent elsewhere. For exercise during law school, I would take long walks while reading paperbacks. (Clearly, this was a pre-smart phone era. I’ve moved to audiobooks.).

Anyhoo…. looking for a new novel to consume? Consider American Fever by Dur e Aziz Amna. Here’s how publisher Simon & Shuster pitches it:

On a year-long exchange program in rural Oregon, a Pakistani student, sixteen-year-old Hira, must swap Kashmiri chai for volleyball practice and try to understand why everyone around her seems to dislike Obama. A skeptically witty narrator, Hira finds herself stuck between worlds. The experience is memorable for reasons both good and bad; a first kiss, new friends, racism, Islamophobia, homesickness. Along the way Hira starts to feel increasingly unwell until she begins coughing up blood, and receives a diagnosis of tuberculosis, pushing her into quarantine and turning her newly established home away from home upside down.

American Fever is a compelling and laugh-out-loud funny novel about adolescence, family, otherness, religion, the push-and-pull of home. It marks the entrance on the international literary scene of the brilliant fresh voice of Dur e Aziz Amna.

There’s a lovely interview with the author in the Los Angeles Review of Books wherein Amna confesses that the protagonist is, in someways, her. They share, after all, an exchange program that whisked them to a rural part of American from Pakistan. But now more than a decade has passed since that experience. Amna is an author and a mother. So, her Hira is “perhaps angrier, less diplomatic, hopefully less mature” than the author today.

Her book is, of course, an immigrant story. But immigration is complex. I love this description Amna gave to the LARB:

I think that so much of moving to another place is a constant tussle between these two identities, which can almost feel like time travel. You are a person who left; you are a person who came. You are a person who knows nothing; you are a person who remembers everything.

Happy reading!

-KitJ