The poetry and the art that inspired Leila are both orientalist and sexist, building storylines around a powerless woman. Byron figures into her narrative, though, in this case, the troublemaking romantic poet is just a vehicle for a determined young woman’s plotting. Leila, who joins us later in the novel, is based on Eugène Delacroix paintings and a poem by Lord Byron. I definitely knew kids like her when I was a Hyde Park kid. The daughter of a French father and an Indian-American mother a Muslim in an Islamophobic world an intellectual at an age when it isn’t always cool to interpret gender and history through paintings: Khayyam’s real from her first moments on the page. Khayyam starts the book by reminding us she has her own name and identity, even if that name and identity is often stripped from her by people who pigeonhole her into one space, identity, nationality, or other role. She’s also a nostalgia trip for someone who grew up in Hyde Park as an infinitely less-cool version of her. Khayyam is a terrific young adult heroine: smart, savvy, and a great vehicle for the wish-fulfillment of her readers. Ahmed’s heroines are contemporary Hyde Park teenager Khayyam, whose academic parents are embarrassingly in love and who is on a quest to uncover obscured women’s voices, and 19th-century Leila, who seeks to have a voice and a life of her own.
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