This inability to be what her parents want has caused tremendous anxiety within Karina and when her parents leave for a vacation to Bangladesh for a month, she is hoping to be able to relax and enjoy life for 28 days with her Dadu, paternal grandma, and her friends, Cora and Nandini. Karina loves English and wants nothing more to major in English in college, but her parents are insistent and despite her struggles with math and science she is determined she has no choice in the matter and must make them proud by being a doctor.

Samir her younger brother, a freshman, is a robotics nerd and the pride of their family. Her conservative Muslim parents are immigrants from Bangladesh and very over protective of their oldest child. Karina Ahmed is 16 and expected to be a doctor when she grows up. This book has relationships, it is a romance novel afterall, but whether the characters are straight or LGBTQ+, there isn’t more than kissing and hand holding and would probably be fine for 9th grade and up if you are ok with a Muslim lead lying to her parents and having a boyfriend. Undoubtedly the author is a good writer, and brown Muslims are not a monolith, but I feel like sometimes we need to square away who we are before we just clamor for what we want. There was a lot of potential to discuss mental health and family expectation, but the end unraveled all that the book could have been. But alas I felt that she let other’s fight her battles and she really only threw her religion and culture around as weighted plot oppressors, not as strands of her life that she had to decide to embrace or understand in the process of growing into herself. The author mentions in the forward that she is representing her story, not a representation of all Bangladeshi- Muslim American girls, but for an OWN voice book with such a clever premise, I really wanted to be shown more than I was told, I wanted to feel the protagonists strength, and cheer her on as she found her happiness on her terms. Sadly, by the end, I was disappointed with the conclusion, the predictability, the stereotypes, and the cliche’ of it all.

I was genuinely invested in the characters and wanted to see how it all resolved. I have to be honest that this book really held my attention and was hard to put down for about two-thirds of the 416 pages.

Counting down with you tashie