Three Pakistani-American teenagers, on a trip through the land of pork ribs, mechanical bulls, and Confederate flags.It’s going to be quite an adventure.
The summer after her freshman year of college, Mariam is looking forward to working and hanging out with her best friends: irrepressible and beautiful Ghazala and religious but closeted Umar.
But when a scandalous photo of Ghaz appears on a billboard in Times Square, Mariam and Umar come up with a plan to rescue her from her furious parents. And what could be a better escape than a spontaneous road trip down to New Orleans?
With the heartbreaking honesty of Julie Murphy’s Dumplin’ mixed with the cultural growing pains and smart snark of When Dimple Met Rishi, this wry, remarkable road-trip story is about questioning where you come from—and choosing the family that chooses you back.
Sheba Karim is the author of Mariam Sharma Hits the Road, That Thing We Call a Heart, and Skunk Girl. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and NYU School of Law and currently lives in Nashville. You can visit her online at www.shebakarim.com.
Pack a release date much, publishing?? You can’t click in this post without hitting a major must-read title, from magic-filled fantasies to fun romances of fancy to serious, heart-stopping contemporaries, to works that blur genre lines. But there’s far too much to see here to waste space on me blathering, so let’s get to it!
YA Open Mic is a monthly series in which YA authors share personal stories on topics of their choice. The aim of the series is to peel away the formality of bios and offer authors a platform to talk about something readers won’t necessarily find on their websites. This month, eleven authors discuss everything from […]
School’s not out for summer just yet, but that doesn’t mean we can’t start dreaming about those life-changing (or, at the very least, loungey) days already. These eight YA reads about summers that shake things up are all you need to countdown to your own stellar summer adventure–whether you’ll be scooping ice cream or solving […]
When I was a kid, I never saw myself on the page. Like never. Occasionally, there’d be a brown person on the screen—like the monkey brain eaters from Indiana Jones And the Temple of Doom, or Apu from The Simpsons. Such stellar representations, no? Yup. (You can read some of my thoughts on that in […]
Fantasy novels may tend to have the highest profile in YA lit, but as much as I love them, contemporary will always have my heart. Whether it’s a coming of age, a heart-fluttery romance, a pitch-perfect friendship story, a heart-racing thriller, a tearjerking examination of grief and tragedy, or an empowering and inspiring look at […]
