SPILLED INK

Afghan American twins reckon with a hate crime.

Yusuf and Yalda are polar opposites: Popular, outgoing Yusuf plays in a band. Introverted, artistic Yalda socializes with two close friends. After a musician at a local competition makes an Islamophobic joke onstage targeting recent Afghan refugee arrivals, Yusuf pranks the audience. His response goes viral, and tensions in their small Virginia town boil over. When Yusuf suffers serious injuries from a mysterious fall, Yalda tries to determine who hurt him while facing her own insecurities. The inconsistent writing unfortunately distances readers from the unfolding narrative due to awkward transitions, segues that feel random, and pivotal plot points that are relayed after the fact. Yalda’s personal growth and how the community unites against hate crimes would have benefitted from greater exploration. The twins’ immediate family is nonreligious, and religious details are at times absent or presented in ways that may strike some readers as erasure. First-person narrator Yalda struggles with whether “the hyphen sometimes used in my label means a connection between two worlds or if one side is being taken away from the other and leaving me as something less than whole.” This inner battle manifests in part in her unflattering judgment of her religious aunt and her perceptions of a refugee classmate, but the light character development may instead convey a message of assimilation.

Introduces critical themes but struggles to address them with sufficient depth and nuance.