Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know by Samira Ahmed
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In this, Ahmed's third novel, she introduces us to a young woman, Khayyam, who, much like the protagonists of the first two novels, "Love, Hate, and Other Filters" and "Internment" is a proud, unapologetic, if soul-searching Indian-American Muslim. She differs from Maya and Layla, respectively, in that she has another couple of layers of duality to her sense of self - she is bi-racial and bi-national, her mother being Indian, and her father being from France.

And, of course, probably the most central to this story, Khayyam is a brilliant young woman, striving to make a mark on a male-dominated world. Her vehicle to do so is an essay competition, and she has decided to focus on the mysterious figure of Leila, who comes up in the work of three male artists of the 19th century canon: French novelist Alexandre Dumas, French painter Eugene Delacroix, and English poet Lord Byron.

Even more masterful than Ahmed's use of the mystery genre to address the very important theme of male hegemony, is her use of the Young Adult (YA) genre itself. Ahmed has discovered a unique formula for herself as an author: she delivers highly political content -- concerning such prevailing themes as Islamophobia, racism, human rights violations, and sexism -- in a seemingly apolitical package; namely the Young Adult novel. My belief is that she does so knowingly. She is aware that she is reaching the very audience she needs to reach -- young people.

It is this writer's hope that she will not only succeed in empowering the next generation, in all its diverse manifestations (which, by the way, I know, in my role as educator working with a very diverse student body, she has done), but that she will also politicize them, so that the young people reading her work will take on her themes and apply them to the world they live in, and the world they want their own children to inhabit.


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