Mar 6

Mar 6 All My Rage

Author: Sabaa Tahir
Publisher: Razorbill
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Sabaa Tahir comes a brilliant, unforgettable, and heart-wrenching contemporary YA 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 Cloud’s 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.

TL;DR Review

All My Rage is a deeply emotional, beautiful novel that sets a whole new bar for contemporary YA. It’s sad all the way through, but resonant and meaningful.

For you if: You like books that break your heart (even if you don’t usually read YA).

Full Review

Here’s the thing: An Ember in the Ashes might be my all-time favorite fantasy series (yes, I know that’s a big statement). So I will read literally anything Sabaa Tahir puts in front of me, even if it’s outside my usual genres. And when she calls it a novel “torn from her heart”? Y’ALL. All My Rage is just as excellent as you’ve been told.

The book is about two Pakistani teenagers, Salahudin (Sal) and Noor, in a desert small town in California. They were childhood friends, practically siblings, until a recent major argument. It’s tough on both of them, as Sal’s mother is sick and his father battles alcoholism, and Noor’s uncle is bitter, mean, and controlling. But when Sal’s mother takes a turn for the worse, they come back together. The months that follow are marked by hard choices, painful betrayals, devastating revelations, and glimmers of hope.

If you’ve heard about this book before now, you’ve probably heard that it’s sad, and you might have assumed that means it has a sad ending or something sad happens. But it’s more than that; sadness and struggle are laced into every part of this story. Reading it made me feel like my chest was caving in. And yet with sentences that take your breath away and characters you’d take a bullet for and the way Tahir writes so deeply about the experience of being a Brown teenager in America, it’s so worth it.

If contemporary YA isn’t your genre, still don’t write this one off. It goes so far beyond whatever preconceived notions we have about genre. It’s really, really good.