All My Rage

Reviewed by Paige Pagan

Review Source: Teaching for Change
Book Author: Sabaa Tahir

A powerful contemporary young adult novel, All My Rage is rife with anger and grief on the ongoing price of the American dream for immigrant families. This narrative is an homage to the predecessors who painstakingly worked to carve out a smoother pathway for their descendants and a critique on the ways in which systemic oppression and societal discrimination work to keep generations of immigrants from reaching that dream.

Readers toggle between the past in Lahore, Pakistan, where Misbah becomes the catalyst for immigration to the United States and the present in Juniper, California, where her descendants struggle to fulfill Misbah’s American dream in the wake of her sudden death, while also trying to achieve their own dreams. On one hand, Salahudin (Sal) assumes the responsibility of paying off the family’s debt to keep his mother’s motel open and with his father sinking deeper into alcoholism, Sal reluctantly turns to drug dealing. On the other hand, Noor, Sal’s best friend, once so resolute on secretly applying to college as an escape route from her abusive uncle, now becomes hopeless after losing the only mother-figure she ever had. In their collective grief (and via Misbah’s intervention in the afterlife to unite them), the two childhood friends fall in love. Then one night, Sal and Noor get pulled over as a result of racial profiling, but when the police find drugs in the car, the teens’ futures get put on the line and it becomes clear just how elusive the American dream really is for kids like them.

Tahir sheds light on the unshakeable U.S. class system and the myriad ways that society works to ensure social mobility is nearly unachievable for those at the bottom of the pyramid. Tahir presents the layers of trauma suffered by these teens, including sexual assault, physical abuse, racism, religious discrimination, and more to underscore how despite those challenges, it was already predetermined where they belonged in society. Tahir is careful not to excuse the act of drug dealing, but rather she humanizes the experience and reveals how the justice system fails to protect and hear the stories of youth like Sal and Noor. The text ends with a message on the significance of forgiveness, necessity to bide one’s time, and the mission to still rise despite the forces of repression.

This text can be raised in a unit on immigration — how might first-generation immigrants and those who come after be affected by carrying the dreams of those who have come before them and what does the “American dream” really mean? It can also be raised in a unit on the criminal justice system — what kind of advocates are there for minorities and on what basis should consequences be delineated?

Paige Pagan is a Social Justice Books program specialist at Teaching for Change.

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All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir
Published by Penguin on March 1, 2022
Genres: Grief, Muslim
Pages: 384
Reading Level: High School
ISBN: 9780593202357
Review Source: Teaching for Change

Publisher's Synopsis: National Book Award WINNER
Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature WINNER
An INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!
An INSTANT INDIE BESTSELLER!

"All My Rage is a love story, a tragedy and an infectious teenage fever dream about what home means when you feel you don’t fit in." — New York Times Book Review

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Sabaa Tahir comes a brilliant, unforgettable, and heart-wrenching contemporary novel about family and forgiveness, love and loss, in a sweeping story that crosses generations and continents.

Lahore, Pakistan. Then.
Misbah is a dreamer and storyteller, newly married to Toufiq in an arranged match. After their young life is shaken by tragedy, they come to the United States and open the Clouds' Rest Inn Motel, hoping for a new start.
 
Juniper, California. Now.
Salahudin and Noor are more than best friends; they are family. Growing up as outcasts in the small desert town of Juniper, California, they understand each other the way no one else does. Until The Fight, which destroys their bond with the swift fury of a star exploding.  
 
Now, Sal scrambles to run the family motel as his mother Misbah’s health fails and his grieving father loses himself to alcoholism. Noor, meanwhile, walks a harrowing tightrope: working at her wrathful uncle’s liquor store while hiding the fact that she’s applying to college so she can escape him — and Juniper — forever.
 
When Sal’s attempts to save the motel spiral out of control, he and Noor must ask themselves what friendship is worth — and what it takes to defeat the monsters in their pasts and the ones in their midst.  
 
From one of today’s most cherished and bestselling young adult authors comes a breathtaking novel of young love, old regrets, and forgiveness — one that’s both tragic and poignant in its tender ferocity.