All My Rage: A Novel by Sabaa Tahir

Related Articles

An Ember In The Ashes (4 book series) by Sabaa Tahir

A Sky Beyond the Storm by Sabaa Tahir

A Reaper at the Gates by Sabaa Tahir

Categories	Literature & Fiction
Author	Sabaa Tahir
Publisher	Razorbill (March 1, 2022)
Language	English
Paperback	384 pages
Item Weight	12.6 ounces
Dimensions	5.5 x 0.97 x 8.25 inches

I. Book introduction

An INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!
An INSTANT INDIE BESTSELLER!

“All My Rage is a love story, a tragedy and an infectious teenage fever dream about what home means when you feel you don’t fit in.” — New York Times Book Review

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

Editorial Reviews

****EIGHT starred reviews****
2022 Boston Globe-Horn Book Fiction and Poetry Winner
Paste Magazine Best YA Book of March 22 Selection
A Junior Library Guild Selection
An Amazon Editors Personal Early Pick
A Kids Indies Next Pick March/April 22
An Amazon Best YA of March 22

“This is not the Sabaa Tahir you know…but it’s the Sabaa Tahir you NEED to know. All My Rage is a gorgeous, star-crossed story about the costs of the American Dream and the way unexpected routes appear when you need them most. I read this in a single day.” – Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Two Ways

“Searing. Riveting. Beautiful. All My Rage takes the reader on an unforgettable journey into the heart of love. Exploring the painful truths of hidden traumas and the crush of broken dreams, Sabaa Tahir shows us the healing, redemptive power of forgiveness, of hope, of connection in her stunning contemporary debut.” —Samira Ahmed, New York Times bestselling author of Internment

“We all know Sabaa Tahir is a master at creating epic fantasy worlds filled with terrifying, imaginary monsters. Here, Sabaa turns her considerable talent and skill to the real—but no less terrifying—monsters that dwell in the human heart. In richly evocative prose and with characters so well crafted I’m sure I know them, All My Rage takes a clear-eyed look at the ways in which we hurt and heal each other. It’s a gorgeous meditation on grief and love and the possibilities each of us have for redemption. This book will stay with me for a long time to come.” —Nicola Yoon, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Sun Is Also a Star

“All My Rage is an unflinching, profound force that will rattle your heart and toughen your soul. Sabaa Tahir’s razor-sharp writing never shies away from the world’s harshness while always finding the light in the dark for our special, unforgettable narrators.” —Adam Silvera, New York Times bestselling author of They Both Die at the End

“All My Rage is an expert study in all that’s tangled within the closest of our relationships—the pain and the love, the ugliness and the beauty, the potential to break and the potential to repair. Painful, powerful, hopeful, and magnificently crafted.” —Randy Ribay, author of Patron Saints of Nothing

“Tahir packs an absolutely unforgettable punch in her first contemporary YA. . . .This is the kind of book that positively climbs into your bones and steals your breath in the very best way.” —Buzzfeed Books

★ “Tahir’s lyrical prose unpacks both the beautiful and the brutal. She deftly captures the layers of grief, rage, family, examination of faith, and forgiveness, while managing to inject levity into dire situations and provide a semblance of hope . . . Put this book at the top of your list.” —SLJ, starred review

★ “Tahir brilliantly shows how interconnected societal forces shape communities and people’s lives through the accumulated impact of circumstances beyond their control. A deeply moving, intergenerational story. An unforgettable emotional journey.” – Kirkus Reviews, starred review

★ “An unyieldingly earnest generational story for contemporary audiences, Rage is a knife-sharp narrative with an obliterating impact that will leave readers thinking of it long after turning the last page.” – Booklist, starred review

★ “A gift every step of the way.”– Bookpage, starred review

★ “Heartbreaking but ultimately hopeful, this memorable novel leaves the characters with what they deserve most: a future.”– BCCB, starred review

★ “This standalone novel feels timely and important and should be on every library shelf for teens.” – School Library Connection, starred review

★ “[A] powerful, viscerally told novel.“ – Publishers Weekly (starred review)

★“This unforgettable multigenerational contemporary YA novel delivers pain, heartache and anger – but also love, hope and redemption.”– Shelf Awareness (starred review)

“Some of the best contemporary fiction out there is YA, and ‘All My Rage’ is one of the strongest new examples. This moving—and at times devastating—book follows best friends Noor and Salahudin as Sal tries to save his family’s motel and Noor tries to strike out on her own.”—Marie Claire

“This powerful novel tackles everything from systemic racism to the fragile bonds of friendship.”—PopSugar

“The first-person prose vibrates with adolescent intensity—of grief, desire, and above all searing rage—as Tahir’s young heroes are faced with grown-up choices they feel ill-equipped to make. But equipped they are: with poetry, music, tradition, and their capacity to love.” —Entertainment Weekly

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of March 2022: Dreams take a toll on the dreamer, and so it is for Misbah, Toufiq, and their teenage son Salahudin. All My Rage flips between past and present, beginning with a young Pakistani couple, looking for a fresh start, who move to a small California town and buy a hotel. Fast forward to present day, and their son, Sal, is struggling to hold it all together. The hotel which once held so much promise is now an albatross around their necks, and his parents’ lives are unravelling at the seams. Tahir’s characters are pulled this way and that, caught up in relationships that burn white-hot with the intensity of love and anger, but still have room for forgiveness and redemption. This brilliant novel is raw, real, and unstoppable. —Seira Wilson, Amazon Editor –This text refers to the hardcover edition.

About Sabaa Tahir

– Sabaa Tahir is a Pakistani-American young adult novelist best known for her New York Times-bestselling An Ember in the Ashes and its sequels.

– Two of her novels, An Ember in the Ashes and A Torch Against the Night, were listed among Time Magazine’s 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time in 2020. In 2022, her novel All My Rage won the 2022 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award.

– Sabaa Tahir grew up in California’s Mojave Desert at her family’s eighteen-room motel. Her parents emigrated from Pakistan to the United Kingdom before moving their family to the United States. She attended UCLA, during which time she interned at The Washington Post. After graduation, she took a job there as a copy editor. There, she spent her time devouring fantasy novels, raiding her brother’s comic book stash, and playing guitar badly. She began writing An Ember in the Ashes while working nights as a newspaper editor. She likes thunderous indie rock, garish socks, and all things nerd. Sabaa currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

– For more information, please visit Sabaa at SabaaTahir.com or on Twitter @SabaaTahir.

II. [Reviews] All My Rage: A Novel by Sabaa Tahir

Here is a summary of the book Review “All My Rage: A Novel by Sabaa Tahir“. Helps you have the most overview of the book without searching through time. Please access “BookQuote.Net” regularly or save it to keep track and update the latest information.

1. AYMAN Review All My Rage: A Novel

Sabaa Tahir deserves the world and nothing less for birthing this book. “All My Rage: a Novel” took me through all the emotions and i don’t regret it one bit.

sabaa puts into words the way i think and feel. the way that grief, failure, love, struggle, and forgiveness is written in this book made me ACHE!! my heart was pounding and my eyes were puffy and red.

i found myself rooting and fighting for these characters from the first place to the last. i care so much for them. i went to Sabaa Tahir’s book tour in Chicago for this book and literally hearing the way she just talks…like of course this book is a masterpiece.

i definitely respect the Muslim rep in this book. i felt seen as a Pakistani-American Muslim myself. I was especially connected to the parts in the story that were in Lahore, Pakistan because that is where my family is originally from. Reading the Urdu and Punjabi just made me feel so good.

this quickly turned into one of my favorite books of all time that i know i’ll constantly be thinking about in the back of my head.

please look up TWs for this book but the main ones are: islamophobia, racism, drug and alcohol use, loss of loved ones. this is a YA book but it’s heavy on the dark topics

2. JESSICA Review All My Rage: A Novel

oof. this is a tough one. its a novel that absolutely requires the reader to be in the right kind of headspace in order to digest it.

For me, all i could think about while reading this is just how much hurt people hurt other people. and the story for sure induced some rage in me.

And thats why i think last chapter or so saved the entire book “All My Rage”. without it, all the fury that had built up would have prevented me from enjoying this as a whole. i definitely needed that diffusion at the end, personally.

But because of the content material and relevance of it, i can easily see this being taught in school alongside ‘the hate you give.’

3. JANANIE Review All My Rage: A Novel

I will gather my thoughts together about this book “All My Rage” one day but I have two things to say:

(1) Read this book. Preorder it. Request it from the library. Share it. Teach it in schools.

(2) Please please please look up the triggers/content warnings on this one. This was a difficult read for me in a lot of ways and while I needed to look straight into the darkness, others may not be ready to do so.

Ok, I lied—(3) Sabaa astounds as always and I’m grateful she shared this story, her story, with the world.

4. KATHERINE Review All My Rage: A Novel

Sabaa did not disappoint

All My Rage was my #1 anticipated release for this entire upcoming year. Not only am I a HUGE Sabaa Tahir fan, but we have an established YA fantasy author jumping over to YA contemporary? I say this a lot but SIGN ME UP.

I was not let down.

I knew from the dedication page, which simply reads “For those who survive. For those who do not.” That we were in for an emotional ride, and it was the BEST emotional roller coaster.

I dont want to explain the plot. The synopsis explains. I want to touch on why this story is worth reading.

We have main characters who are so accessible and real that even when they do something you WANT to be angry with them for, you aren’t. Because they are human and relatable and you understand their pain.

We have people making good decisions and bad decisions. Whether they are good or bad people doesn’t matter. What matters is the question of : why is this person this way? Can they change? Where will they end up in life? This story is not black and white. No choice is easy or right or wrong.

We have casual racism, hard-core straight up outward racism, Islamophobia. Which is so difficult to read but also so necessary. There are moments that you think to yourself “this is so ridiculous.” Until you realize it’s NOT ridiculous, and that it is a struggle people go through daily and that we need to be reminded of.

We have inside looks to how substance abuse hurts loved ones. But instead of it feeling like an after school special or life lesson it is just life and facts and honesty about a disease.

The trauma and grief the characters are hiding from is expressed so well and so heartbreakingly real.

We have all the love and relationships the characters have with each other, the growth and journeys they go through. It really is such a coming of age story that hits hard in all the right places.

And most of all we have a story that consistently expresses a spark of hope in dark times, even when the characters don’t feel it.

I could quote hundreds of lines from the book but you should just go read it instead.

5/5 and it would be higher if I could.

5. MAJ Review All My Rage: A Novel

A little dark and somewhat depressing, but still impressed!

I read this author’s previous series and really enjoyed it, so when I saw that she was publishing another book (not from the series) I couldn’t wait to read it.

Ms. Tahir is an excellent writer – that much was already clear to me. However, whereas the previous books were a little lighter, this book was heartfelt and felt as if it had come somewhere from within the author’s heart.

Uncovering two migrants’ teenage children’s hearts and minds is difficult and emotional, yet she pulled it off beautifully. There was darkness and light, as occurs with all of us, but she managed to make it believable and even hopeful. I don’t really have the words to describe everything I felt while reading, but I strongly recommend.

Ms. Tahir has a new fan here.

6. UTAH MOM Review All My Rage: A Novel

Beautiful and Heart Breaking

All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir is a beautiful and meaningful story about Salahudin and Noor. They are young high school students who are facing unthinkable circumstances. Though they often make the wrong choices, they must always deal with the consequences. They are sympathetic characters who captured my heart and had me rooting for them.

Tahir writes a beautiful and heart wrenching story that is wonderfully heavy on character development. This is a novel that teaches empathy and understanding.

7. AZANTA Review All My Rage: A Novel

a really quick review — this book is DAMN good. it’s been two weeks since I finished this book and i’m still thinking about it. ik this is bold of me to say but this is probably the best of Sabaa’s books thus far

full review below:

This is a non-spoiler review. Thank you to Penguin Teen for an early copy of this book (honest opinions only).

Trigger warnings for AMR: drug and alcohol addiction, mentions of repressed sexual assault, physical abuse, Islamophobia, racism, death, law enforcement

If you are a fan of Sabaa Tahir, if you are a child of immigrants (or an immigrant to America yourself), if you are Pakistani, if you are Muslim, if you liked any of Khaled Hosseini’s books if you trust my opinion — you need to read this book. Whether or not you like contemporaries, I fiercely recommend All My Rage.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to capture how this book makes me feel. All My Rage is a deep dive into grief, betrayal and forgiveness, loss, and of course, rage. It’s an assessment of hope — but not in the way the Ember series was. It’s a story with true roots of broken American dreams and hiding so deeply within yourself to protect your heart because you look different from your peers.

It’s a YA story with adult themes and yet I think it should be taught in every high school in this country.

I am not Pakistani but I understand Punjabi and Urdu and the visceral experience of having true South Asian representation is a gratifying feeling I will never, ever get used to. Though the Muslim experiences in this book are not ones I relate to, we are not a monolith and the way Sabaa tells these characters’ stories and struggles with faith is deeply respectful and not dismissive in any way. I already know many Muslims may not like the Muslim rep in this book but I ask that you all read AMR with an open mind and knowing that every Muslim is different. I am recommending it because it is not dismissive or disrespectful as many other Muslim rep books are of hijabis or those who follow the faith more closely.

I am a deeply emotional person and that is why I connect with Sabaa’s writing so vehemently. She captures grief in a way that I’ve never been able to express or understand verbally and I cried my EYES out reading this book. It was heart-wrenching and soul-shattering through more than just sadness and heartbreak; I felt seen and vulnerable and that was more than enough to open the floodgates.

If you’ve read any of Sabaa’s books, you’ll know that she knows how to tell a story and how to do revelations. AMR is no different. I would go even as far as to say that All My Rage is her best work — and this is coming from someone who has over 20 copies of the Ember series (and counting). Salahudin, Noor, and Misbah are characters that will live with me for a long, long time to come and to probably no one’s surprise, my favorite was Salahudin. Sabaa truly knows how to write men 😭

All My Rage is a love letter to family, Pakistan, music, and to the ties that bind us together. I highly recommend 💗

8. CHAITY Review All My Rage: A Novel

Book making me cry 🤝 Me rating it five stars.

You know those rare moments when a book you’ve been hyping up for months turns out to be everything you’ve ever asked for from a book and more? It’s one of those. I’m so in love with this book that at times I can’t deal with the idea of ever revisiting it and putting myself through everything for one more time because boy did it hurt. Fellow South Asian and Muslims, be aware this hits way too close to home. In a good way. Actually It doesn’t matter if your are white, black, brown, orange or blue—its a good book that sould be read. And please check the trigger warnings before you consider reading this.

“If we are lost, God is like water, finding the unknowable path when we cannot.”

9. AMINA Review All My Rage: A Novel

All My Rage is a devastatingly profound, emotionally moving story exploring the lives of three main characters and their interwoven journeys. It’s a story of forgiveness and heartache that focuses on a Pakistani community reeling from grief and destructive choices. Yet, it is a love story of two souls desperate to make sense of all the chaos in their world.

Misbah is struggling to run The Cloud’s Rest Motel with her husband Taufiq who happens to drink too much, all the time. The entire business is on her shoulders. When she finds out she is ill, the pressures of the motel, her alcoholic husband, and other people’s difficulties continue to plague her every waking hour.

Salahudin is the son of Misbah and Taufiq. He’s just trying to fit in. It’s his last year of high school and he’s going to ride it out while staying ambiguous to the constraints of being different. When “Sal” gets involved with some dangerous work, he begins to feel the pressure of being discovered. The desire to keep the motel running and operating smoothly puts Sal under more fire.

Noor is an immigrant who comes to America at the age of six. Fighting to find an ounce of semblance, Sal becomes her best friend, helping her navigate the chaos of being another. If it wasn’t for her Uncle Riaz who dug her out from the rubble, Noor would have died along with her entire family during the earthquake in Pakistan. She should be so grateful to her Uncle Riaz, but his desire to give up his culture and religion puts pressure on Noor. He is mean-spirited and doesn’t want Noor to go on to college or have any future besides working at his liquor shop.

Through quiet moments of joy and suffering, the three characters are interconnected in this novel that exquisitely tells a story of truth and forgiveness. I can’t say enough wonderful things about my first time reading a book by Sabaa Tahir. Tahir has a level of eloquence in writing that moves you to reread entire passages. Her sheer generosity with words is breathtaking.

All My Rage touches on many difficult topics: sexual and physical abuse, death, drugs, and prejudice. Yet, Tahir gives respect to every topic, carefully expressing ideas with integrity.

The book does an amazing job of connecting songs to help characters cope with anxiety. I look forward to finding a playlist that has many of my favorites.

Tahir is brave and confident in her storytelling, debunking many myths that newly arrived immigrants and people of color experience. Her graciousness is commendable.

This book was 5/5 stars for me. I’ve already begun recommending All My Rage to friends and family.

10. BASMA Review All My Rage: A Novel

Initial reaction: This book was EVERYTHING. I cried so much and my heart is still aching. I felt so raw reading it and I can’t imagine having the strength to write it. Sabaa already had all my respect and it’s since tripled.

I’ve been reflecting on this book for a while, wondering how to write this review. I read this book in November, and since then, not a day goes by where it doesn’t cross my mind. Sabaa said that All My Rage took her ten years to write. It very well may take me ten years to recover. When we say books have the power to change us, it’s books like this one that do just that.

All My Rage is a story of struggle. It’s a story of loss and love, of failure and success, and of rage and the mercy of forgiveness. This book will leave you raw. And aching. With puffy eyes because you started crying around page 50 and you never stopped. But it’s a story that needs to be told. The struggle of the “American dream”, of two teenagers stuck in a town with their own individual problems and who somehow still need to lean on each other.

I’m going to speak very briefly on the Muslim rep and leave it at that. These characters have a deeply complex relationship with their faith and while it may not be an experience I completely relate to, that doesn’t make it any less valid. The rep is written with the utmost respect for the religion and other Muslims.

There’s a particular scene near the end where a character turns to their faith at their lowest moment, and friends, this scene broke me. There are tears running down my face as I write this review because the amount of grief and emotion in this book is enough to keep me crying months after I read it. I feel as though my soul was shattered by this book, but in a way that I know I’ll be a better person because of.

I always recommend Sabaa’s books, but this is the one. If you only take one book recommendation from me for the rest of time, let it be this one.

TW: drug and alcohol addiction, mentions of repressed sexual assault, physical abuse, Islamophobia, racism, death, law enforcement, grief

I received an arc of this title from PenguinTeen in exchange for an honest review.

III. [Quote] All My Rage: A Novel by Sabaa Tahir

The best book quotes from All My Rage: A Novel

“I wonder what it’s like to be with someone who can love you through your rage.”

“Great passions grow into monsters in the dark of the mind; but if you share them with loving friends they remain human, they can be endured.”

“I’ll survive this. I’ll live. But there’s a hole in me, never to be filled. Maybe that’s why people die of old age. Maybe we could live forever if we didn’t love so completely. But we do. And by the time old age comes, we’re filled with holes, so many that it’s too hard to breathe. So many that our insides aren’t even ours anymore. We’re just one big empty space, waiting to be filled by the darkness. Waiting to be free.”

“Rage can fuel you. But grief gnaws at you slow, a termite nibbling at your soul until you’re a whisper of what you used to be.”

“She was not of my body or my blood, this child. But she was of my soul.”

“If we are lost, God is like water, finding the unknowable path when we cannot”

“But mostly it taught me that music can be more of a home than four walls and a roof.”

“…I’m Salhudin. Sal.”
“’Sal’? No way … You make people call you by your name. If they can say Santiago, Alexander, Demetrius, and Ecclesiastes, they can say Salahudin.”

“How can you know someone for years and still not know their inner currents? I want to sink into the swirls and eddies of her ocean. I want to understand her. But I can’t unless she lets me.”

“The chaiwallah brought sabz chai, Kashmiri-style. It was pink and milky, sprinkled with cardamom and brimming with crushed pistachios and almonds. A romantic tea, I always thought.”

“People see what they want to. I’m sick of hoping that they’ll see me.”

“Anger doesn’t really cover what I feel, though. You get angry because someone almost runs you over in the bike lane. Angry because someone cuts in line at Walmart.
What’s the word for when someone drinks so much, they are ruining your best friend’s life? Or the word for a man so vengeful about his own past that he wants to destroy your future? What’s the word for a woman who was sick for months, but refused to go to the doctor until it was too late? The word for a girl at school whose personal mission is to mess with your head?
Anger ‘s not the right word.
Rage. That’s what this feeling is, eating me up.”

“Each moment joins the next, a murmuration of starlings exploding out o the rafters of my mind and into the the heavens, moving as one, revealing a greater purpose.”

“Some habits are stronger than instinct. Fear. Habit. Despair.”

“Your father—my God, you were his pride and joy. He came home from work to feed you every lunchtime, even if it meant he barely got a chance to eat his own meal. He rocked you to sleep at night. He clipped your tiny nails so carefully that you laughed when he did it. I could not believe he ever thought he would be a bad parent.
You were my world. But to your father, Salahudin? You were the solar system. Bigger. The universe itself. “He will be a neurosurgeon,” your father said. “He will be a writer. He will be an architect.”

“But there’s a hole in me, never to be filled. Maybe that’s why people die of old age. Maybe we could live forever if we didn’t love so completely. But we do. And by the time old age comes, we’re filled with holes, so many that it’s too hard to breathe. So many that our insides aren’t even ours anymore. We’re just one big empty space, waiting to be filled by the darkness. Waiting to be free.”

“I was eighteen. Full of fear. I should have prayed instead for a man unbroken.”

“People love talking about the greatness of the human heart. No bigger than a fist, pumps two thousand gallons of blood a day. Et cetera.
But the human heart is also stupid. At least mine is. No matter how many times I tell it not to hope that Chachu cares about me, it hopes anyway.”

“A mother carries her child’s innocence in her memory. No matter who they become. We carry our hopes and dreams for them and such things are woven into our souls as God is woven into the fibers of this earth.”

“You do not re-enter your home until your guest is on the way to their own.”

“His beauty would have been intimidating, but his hands told the truth”

“Woh harh jagah mojood heh. Iss ghar keh dar-o-diwar bhee rotay-henh.”

“I think about the shit we’ve read in school. Those books all about one problem. A kid who’s bullied. A kid who’s beaten. A kid who’s poor. And I think of us and how we’ve won the shit-luck lottery. We have all the problems.”

“Who my child becomes is not the sum of what happened to him.”

Book excerpts: All My Rage, A Novel By Sabaa Tahir

Chapter 1

Misbah

June, then

Lahore, Pakistan

The clouds over Lahore were purple as a gossip’s tongue the day my mother told me I would wed.

After she delivered the news, I found my father on the veranda. He sipped a cup of tea and surveyed the storm looming above the kite-­spattered skyline.

Change her mind! I wanted to scream. Tell her I’m not ready.

Instead, I stood at his side, a child again, waiting for him to take care of me. I did not have to speak. My father looked at me, and he knew.

“Come now, little butterfly.” He turned his moth-­brown eyes to mine and patted my shoulder. “You are strong like me. You will make the best of it. And at last, you’ll be free of your mother.” He smiled, only half joking.

The monsoon rain swept over Lahore a few minutes later, sending chickens and children squawking for cover, drenching the cement floor of our home. I bent my head to the ground in prayer regardless.

Let my future husband be gentle, I thought, remembering the bruises on my cousin Amna, who married a light-­haired English businessman against her parents’ wishes.Let him be a good man.

I was eighteen. Full of fear. I should have prayed instead for a man unbroken.

Chapter 2

Sal

February, now

Juniper, California

It’s 6:37 a.m. and my father doesn’t want me to know how drunk he is.

“Sal? Are you listening?”

He calls me Sal instead of Salahudin so I don’t hear the slur in his words. Hangs on to our Civic’s steering wheel like it’s going to steal his wallet and bolt.

In the ink-­black morning, all I see of Abu’s eyes are his glasses. The taillights of traffic going into school reflect off the thick square lenses. He’s had them so long that they’re hipster now. A Mojave Desert howler shakes the car—­one of those three-­day winds that rampage through your skin and colonize your ventricles. I hunch deep in my fleece, breath clouding.

“I will be there,” Abu says. “Don’t worry. Okay, Sal?”

My nickname on his lips is all wrong. It’s like by saying it, he’s trying to make me feel like he’s a friend, instead of a mess masquerading as my father.

If Ama were here, she would clear her throat and enunciate “Sa-­lah-­ud-­din,” the precise pronunciation a gentle reminder that she named me for the famous Muslim general, and I better not forget it.

“You said you’d go to the last appointment, too,” I tell Abu.

“Dr. Rothman called last night to remind me,” Abu says. “You don’t have to come, if you have the—­the writing club, or soccer.”

“Soccer season’s over. And I quit the newspaper last semester. I’ll be at the appointment. Ama’s not taking care of herself and someone needs to tell Dr. Rothman—­preferably in a coherent sentence.” I watch the words hit him, sharp little stones.

Abu guides the car to the curb in front of Juniper High. A bleached-­blond head buried in a parka materializes from the shadows of C-­hall. Ashlee. She saunters past the flagpole, through the crowds of students, and toward the Civic. The pale stretch of her legs is courageous for the twenty-­degree weather.

Also distracting.

Ashlee is close enough to the car that I can see her purple nail polish. Abu hasn’t spotted her. He and Ama never said I can’t have a girlfriend. But in the same way that giraffes are born knowing how to run, I was born with the innate understanding that having a girlfriend while still living with my parents is verboten.

Abu digs his fingers into his eyes. His glasses have carved a shiny red dent on his nose. He slept in them last night on the recliner. Ama was too tired to notice.

Or she didn’t want to notice.

“Putar—­” Son.

Ashlee knocks on the window. Her parka is unzipped enough to show the insubstantial welcome to tatooine shirt beneath. She must be freezing.

Two years ago Abu’s eyebrows would have been in his hair. He’d have said“Who is this, Putar?” His silence feels more brutal, like glass shattering in my head.

“How will you get to the hospital?” Abu asks. “Should I pick you up?”

“Just get Ama there,” I say. “I’ll find a ride.”

“Okay, but text me if—­”

“My cell’s not working.” Because you actually have to pay the phone company, Abu. The one thing he’s in charge of and still can’t do. It’s usually Ama hunched over stacks of bills, asking the electric company, the hospital, the cable company if we can pay in installments. Muttering “ullu de pathay”—­sons of owls—­when they say no.

I lean toward him, take a shallow sniff, and almost gag. It’s like he took a bath in Old Crow and then threw on some more as aftershave.

“I’ll see you at three,” I say. “Take a shower before she wakes up. She’ll smell it on you.”

Neither of us says that it doesn’t matter. That even if Ama smells the liquor, she would never say anything about it. Before Abu responds, I’m out, grabbing my tattered journal from where it fell out of my back pocket. Slamming the car door, eyes watering from the cold.

Ashlee tucks herself under my arm. Breathe. Five seconds in. Seven seconds out. If she feels my body tense up, she doesn’t let on.

“Warm me up.” Ashlee pulls me down for a kiss, and the ash of her morning cigarette fills my nostrils.Five seconds in. Seven seconds out. Cars honk. A door thuds nearby and for a moment, I think it is Abu. I think I will feel the weight of his disapproval.Have some tamiz, Putar. I see it in my head. I wish for it.

But when I break from Ashlee, the Civic’s blinker is on and he’s pulling into traffic.

If Noor was here instead of Ashlee, she’d have side-­eyed me and handed me her phone.Not everyone has a dad, jerk. Call him and eat crow. Awk, awk.

She’s not here, though. Noor and I haven’t spoken for months.

Ashlee steers me toward campus, and launches into a story about her two-­year-­old daughter, Kaya. Her words swim into each other, and there’s a glassiness to her eyes that reminds me of Abu at the end of a long day.

I pull away. I met Ashlee junior year, after Ama got sick and I dropped most of my honors classes for regular curriculum. Last fall, after the Fight between Noor and me, I spent a lot of time alone. I could have hung out with the guys on my soccer team, but I hated how many of them threw around words like “raghead” and “bitch” and “Apu.”

Ashlee had just broken up with her girlfriend and started coming to my games, waiting for me in her old black Mustang with its primered hood. We’d shoot the shit. One day, to my surprise, she asked me out.

I knew it would be a disaster. But at least it would be a disaster I chose.

She calls me her boyfriend, even though we’ve only been together two months. It took me three weeks to even work up the nerve to kiss her. But when she’s not high, we laugh and talk about Star Wars or Saga or this showCrown of Fates we both love. I don’t think about Ama so much. Or the motel. Or Noor.

“MR. MALIK.” Principal Ernst, a bowling pin of a man with a nose like a bruised eggplant, appears through the herds of students heading to class.

Behind Ernst is Security Officer Derek Higgins, aka Darth Derek, so-­called because he’s an oppressive mouth-­breather who sweeps around Juniper High like it’s his personal Star Destroyer.

Ashlee escapes with a glare from Ernst, but this is the second time I’ve pissed him off in a week, so I get a skeletal finger digging into my chest. “You’ve been missing class. Not anymore. Detention if you’re late. First and only warning.”

Don’t touch me, I want to say. But that would invite Darth Derek’s intervention, and I don’t feel like a billy club in the face.

Ernst moves on, and Ashlee reaches for me again. I stuff my hands in the pockets of my hoodie, the stiffness in my chest easing at the feel of cotton instead of skin. Later, I’ll write about this. I try to imagine the crack of my journal opening, the steady, predictable percussion of my pen hitting paper.

“Don’t look like that,” Ashlee says.

“Like what?”

“Like you wish you were anywhere else.”

A direct response would be a lie, so I hedge. “Hey—­um, I have to go to the bathroom,” I tell her. “I’ll see you later.”

“I’ll wait for you.”

“Nah, go on.” I’m already walking away. “Don’t want you to get in trouble with Ernst.”

Juniper High is massive, but not in a shiny-­TV-­high-­school kind of way. It’s a bunch of long cinder block buildings with doors on each end and nothing but dirt between them. The gym looks like an airplane hangar. Everything is a dusty, sand-­blasted white. The only green thing around here is our mascot—­a hulking roadrunner painted near the front office—­and the bathroom walls, which, according to Noor, are the precise color of goose shit.

The bathroom is empty, but I duck into a stall anyway. I wonder if every dude with a girlfriend finds himself hiding from her next to a toilet at some point.

If I’d been hanging out with Noor instead of Ashlee, I’d already be sitting in English class, because she insists on being on time to everything.

Boots scrape against the dirty tiles as someone else enters. Through the crack in the stall door, I make out Atticus, Jamie Jensen’s boyfriend. He enjoys soccer, white rappers, and relaxed-­fit racism.

“I need ten,” Atticus says. “But I only have a hundred bucks.”

A lanky figure comes into view: Art Britman, tall and pale like Atticus, but hollowed out by too much bad weed. He wears his typical red plaid and black work boots.

I’ve known Art since kindergarten. Even though he hangs out with the white-­power kids, he gets along with everyone. Probably because he supplies most of Juniper High with narcotics.

“A hundred gets you five. Not ten.” Art has a smile in his voice because he is truly the nicest drug dealer who’s ever lived. “I give you what you can pay for, Atty!”

“Come on, Art—­”

“I gotta eat too, bro!” Art digs in his pocket and holds a bag of small white pills just out of Atticus’s reach. A hundred bucks? For that? No wonder Art’s smiling all the time.

Atticus curses and hands over his cash. A few seconds later, he and the pills are gone.

Art looks over at my stall. “Who’s in there? You got the shits or you spying?”

“It’s me, Art. Sal.”

For a guy who careens from one illegal activity to another, Art is uncannily oblivious. “Sal!” he shouts. “Hiding from Ashlee?” His laughter echoes and I wince. “She’s gone, you can come out.”

I consider silence. If a dude is dropping anchor in the bathroom, it’s rude to have a conversation with him. Everyone knows that.

Apparently not Art. I grimace and step out to wash my hands.

“You doing okay, man?” Art adjusts his beanie in the mirror, blond hair poking out like the fingers of a wayward plant. “Ashlee told me your mom’s up shit creek.”

Ashlee and Art are cousins. And even though they’re white— ­and I stupidly thought white people ignored their extended families—­they’re close. Closer than I am to my cousin, who lives in Los Angeles and insists all homeless people should “just get jobs.”Usually while he drinks Pellegrino out of a ceramic tumbler he ordered because a Pixtagram ad told him it would save the dolphins.

“Yeah,” I say to Art. “My mom’s not feeling great.”

“Cancer sucks, man.”

She doesn’t have cancer.

“When my nana Ethel was sick, it was miserable,” Art says. “Oneday she was fine, the next she looked like a corpse. I thought she was a goner. She’s fine now, though. And she got a painkiller prescription she never uses, so that’s lucrative.” Art’s laugh echoes offthe walls. “You good? Cuz I could give you an old friends’ discount.”

“I’m good.” Not even tempted. One shit-­faced person in the house is enough.

I hurry away just as the bell rings. The dirt quad empties out quicker than water down a drain. As I turn the corner to the English wing, Noor appears from the other side.

The sun hits the windows, painting her braided hair a dozen colors. I think of the pictures she has all over her room at her shithead uncle’s house, taken by a massive space telescope she told me about once. That’s what her hair is like, black and red and gold, the heart of space lit from within. Her head is down and she doesn’t see me, instead intent on racing the bell.

We reach Mrs. Michaels’s door at the same time. Noor’s face looks different, and I realize after a second that she’s wearing makeup. She pulls out her headphones, hidden in her hoodie, and a tinny song spills from them. I recognize it because Ama loves it. “The Wanderer.” Johnny Cash and U2.

“Hey,” I say.

She gives me a nod, the way you do when you’ve stopped seeing someone because you’ve got your own shit to worry about. Then she ducks into the classroom, a blur of beaded bracelets, dark jeans, and the cheap, astringent soap her uncle sells at his liquor shop.

For a second, the Fight hangs between us, specter versions of ourselves six months ago facing each other at a campground in Veil Meadows. Noor confessing that she was in love with me. Kissing me.

Me shoving her away, telling her I didn’t feel the same. Spewing every hurtful thing I could think of, because her kiss was a blade tearing open something inside.

Noor staring at me like I’d transformed into an angry kraken. She had a pine cone in her hands. I kept waiting for her to peg me with it.

The door slams behind her and I grab the handle to follow her. Then I stop. The bell rings. The hall clock behind me plods on, each tick a dumbbell slamming to the floor. A minute passes. I read and reread a sign on the door for a writing contest that Mrs. Michaels has been bugging me to enter.

But even though I’ve walked into AP English every day for five months, today I can’t make myself do it. I can’t sit across the room from Noor, knowing she’ll never tease me about my llama socks again, or kick my ass inNight Ops 4, or come over on Saturday mornings and eat paratha with me and Ama.

I try to remember Ama’s smile when she was well and would pick me up after class. The way she lit up and asked me about my life, like I had climbed Everest instead of merely survived another day at school.

“Mera putar, undar ja,” she’d tell me now. My son, go inside. I sigh, and as I reach for the door, a bony hand grabs my arm.

“Mr. Malik—­” The handle slips from my grip. Ernst’s pale green eyes bore into me, daring me to snap, or wanting me to. “What did I say earlier?” he asks.

“Don’t.” I jerk away from him. Shut up, Salahudin. “Don’t touch me.”

I wait for him to paw at me again. Suspend me. Call DarthDerek. Instead he lets me go and shakes his head, a man sternly disappointed in a rebellious dog, giving the leash a little yank.

“Incorrect,” Ernst says. “I said ‘first and only warning.’ Detention. My office. Three o’clock.”

….

Note: Above are quotes and excerpts from the book “All My Rage: A Novel by Sabaa Tahir”. If you find it interesting and useful, don’t forget to buy paper books to support the Author and Publisher!

The above content has been collected from various sources on the internet. Click the Share button to recommend the book to your friends!

BookQuote.Net Sincerely Introduced!