THE BAD MUSLIM DISCOUNT

The paths of a man from Pakistan and a woman from Iraq—each rebelling against the restrictive ties of place, family, and religion in radically different ways—collide in the United States.

When we meet Anvar Faris in Karachi in 1995, he has never been the ideal child for his middle-class family, country, or Islam. The second son of a strict Muslim mother and a slightly more laid-back father, he would rather leave the trappings of obedience to his older brother, Aamir. Anvar grows up amid the fallout of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, but then when he's in his teens, his father moves the family to California. There, Anvar meets and falls in love with the like-minded Zuha Shah, but he loses her in college when she takes a more religious path. Meanwhile, we meet Azza as a preteen girl in Baghdad. After she loses her mother to cancer, she must keep house for her repressive father and nurse her terminally ill brother. Three years later, her father is abducted and tortured by the Americans during the Iraq War. Alone, she must make the devastating choice to leave her brother behind as she flees. When her father is released and finds her, they go to another country, where he takes his violent anger out on her. A bargain with a village man takes her and her father to the U.S. In San Francisco, she moves into Anvar’s building and the two begin, inexplicably, to sleep together. The story is well written, but the fascinating familial and religious dynamics are often too convoluted, and the relationship between Anvar and Azza never takes off because Azza is not as fully developed a character as Anvar. Her victimization defines her even when she breaks free, which makes her disappointingly one-dimensional.

An engaging though overly complicated story of two people fighting to overcome their circumstances.