I AM THUNDER

Muzna Saleem is a North London teen who struggles with low self-esteem.

The daughter of Pakistani immigrants, she considers herself ugly and is taunted by peers. Muzna dreams of being a novelist, but she feels obliged to fulfill her money-strapped parents’ desire for her to become a doctor. When Muzna’s best friend is caught with a boyfriend, her parents force her to sever their ties to avoid shame by association. After her family moves for a new job, a friendless Muzna looks to reinvent herself, taking hormone pills to regulate her facial hair. She is instantly attracted to Arif, a hunky, brooding fellow Muslim student who is surprisingly kind to her. This leads to a romance with a twist: Arif’s older brother appears to be sympathetic to violent extremism. Muzna is portrayed as a naïve victim of her own self-loathing and insecurities who is lured into a dangerous situation. Despite Muzna’s first-person narration, readers might struggle to understand her internal thought processes or believe the degree of her awareness of others’ attempts to influence her thoughts and actions. Secondary characters represent the diversity of the British Muslim population, such as a Nigerian British classmate, a service-oriented hijabi medical student, and Muzna’s own traditional yet anti-hijab parents, but they are insufficiently fleshed out given the delicacy and ambition of the central premise, and a theatrical ending does not redeem the overall lack of nuance.

Fails to do justice to the complexity of the subject matter.