Love, Hate & Other Filters by Samira Ahmed

First reports blame someone who shares Maya’s last name, and the backlash they suffer leads her parents to restrict Maya’s options. Interspersed with Maya’s intimate first-person account are brief, cinematic interludes tracking a disturbed young man who commits a terror attack. Her matchmaking parents like Kareem, an intriguing young Indian man Maya meets and dates, while Phil, a white classmate who’s been her longtime crush, remains a secret from her parents. Meanwhile, two potential love interests command her attention. Time is running out to break the news to her parents that her filmmaking is more than just a hobby. Maya, the only brown girl in her school with the only immigrant parents, loves parts of her Indian culture but blames everything she thinks she can’t have on her cultural constraints and on the fact that she’s different. But her world is shattered when a suicide bomber strikes in the American heartland by chance, he shares Maya's last name.High school senior Maya Aziz works up the courage to tell her parents that she’s gotten into the film school of her dreams in New York City, but their expectations combined with anti-Muslim backlash from a terror attack threaten to derail her dream. There's the also the fun stuff, like laughing with her best friend Violet, making on-the-spot documentaries, sneaking away for private swimming lessons at a secret pond in the woods. staying nearby in Chicago and being matched with a 'suitable' Muslim boy), and the one where she goes to film school in New York City-and maybe, just maybe, kisses a guy she's only known from afar. Maya Aziz is torn between futures: the one her parents expect for their good Indian daughter (i.e. Publisher's Synopsis: The instant New York Times bestseller comes to paperback.

Genres: Family, Immigration and Emigration, Muslim Love, Hate and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed (Yes, Kareem is there when it counts, too!) Reads a bit like white saviors, doesn’t it? Well, I think I have a slightly different take on this. In that key moment, it’s Phil who saves Maya, and in smaller moments it’s Maya’s white bff Violet who saves and protect her. Adding to Maya’s stress is the fact that Phil is neither Muslim nor Indian American, someone Maya believes her parents will never approve.

Love, Hate & Other Filters by Samira Ahmed