ARC Review: An Emotion of Great Delight by Tahereh Mafi

Review by: Paige

Rating: ★ ★ ★

I received an advanced copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. Thank you so much to HarperCollins for providing this galley!

Publication: June 1, 2021

Synopsis: From bestselling and National Book Award-nominated author Tahereh Mafi comes a stunning novel about love and loneliness, navigating the hyphen of dual identity, and reclaiming your right to joy—even when you’re trapped in the amber of sorrow.

It’s 2003, several months since the US officially declared war on Iraq, and the American political world has evolved. Tensions are high, hate crimes are on the rise, FBI agents are infiltrating local mosques, and the Muslim community is harassed and targeted more than ever. Shadi, who wears hijab, keeps her head down.

She’s too busy drowning in her own troubles to find the time to deal with bigots.

Shadi is named for joy, but she’s haunted by sorrow. Her brother is dead, her father is dying, her mother is falling apart, and her best friend has mysteriously dropped out of her life. And then, of course, there’s the small matter of her heart—

It’s broken.

Shadi tries to navigate her crumbling world by soldiering through, saying nothing. She devours her own pain, each day retreating farther and farther inside herself until finally, one day, everything changes.

She explodes.

An Emotion of Great Delight is a searing look into the world of a single Muslim family in the wake of 9/11. It’s about a child of immigrants forging a blurry identity, falling in love, and finding hope—in the midst of a modern war.

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Review: I believe it is an obvious fact of life that Tahereh Mafi is one of the most talented YA writers currently in the game. She has such a way with words—her prose is lyrical and emotive, quasi-stream of consciousness at times, rich and propulsive. An Emotion of Great Delight was my first book of Mafi’s outside of Shatter Me, and I am elated that she stepped beyond that world to expand into contemporary literature, to tell these heavy but very necessary stories about Muslim-American identity (while I haven’t read A Very Large Expanse of Sea (yet), I urge you to).

However, I feel a bit conflicted about this novel. While on the one hand it was a resonant, deeply-sad-yet-ultimately-hopeful “slice of life” story and, really, more character study than anything else, there were undoubtedly some hesitations I had with it. I am an agnostic White woman, so I can’t speak to the Muslim-American representation, the hijab representation, or the representation of Islam itself. Bearing that in mind, I will direct you to these few reviews from Muslim readers that speak to some of the book’s issues (the burqa line stood out as immediately and outright harmful—though I believe that the now-published version does not include it and Mafi issued a clarification). I encourage you to further seek reviews from Muslim readers.

But I do think that we cannot possibly expect all authors to be “correct” at all times, and I know that much of this story was infused with Mafi’s own experiences as a teenager growing up in the wake of 9/11. I hope we can be as receptive of her individual authorial presence in this story as we are critical of her shortcomings when it comes to how she represents Muslim identity on the page. Her Author’s Note at the beginning discusses how she hopes this novel can help reclaim multi-layered Muslim identity stories, and the novel touches explicitly on that too. This was a complicated, oft-contradictory, hard novel. I hope we can open up these conversations rather than shut them down, as calls for more complex and nuanced stories inherently invite in conversation about shortcomings and failures, too. No identity cateogry is a monolith, nor experiences with it.

In terms of the story itself, I found it slim and stunning. Mafi’s poeticism shone through, and it was a powerful, profound, moving read. However, I felt very overwhelmed at times by the sheer amount of how much was going on—emotionally for Shadi, mainly. There was a lot going on in her life, and it was hard for a novel so slender to address everything adequately. The ending was very rushed and didn’t allow for much-needed breathing room. It could have used an extra chapter or two, and I’m unsure how I feel about it departing with the romance layer of the story rather than the family layer, which I felt was much more significant throughout the novel and needed greater attention by the end. It was very much an exploratory text, but not one that I felt reached true resolutions.

Overall, I have strikingly little to say about what actually happens in this story because I think it is a book that simply demands to be read. So much of its power exists on the page and invites you in for a journey, one I hope readers are willing to take in all its difficulties. There is much to be discovered here, and I look forward to more realistic fiction from Mafi, even if, as readers have pointed out, there’s also much to be wary of.