An Emotion Of Great Delight by Tahereh Mafi Book Review

“I’d thought, for so long, that this pain I clenched every day in my fist would be my sole possession, all I ever carried for the rest of my life. . . .

It scared me.

I didn’t know how to handle the shape of hope. I didn’t know how such a thing might fit into my body. I was so afraid, so afraid of being disappointed.”

(pg. 245)

About

Author: Tahereh Mafi

Genre: Young Adult Contemporary Romance

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Synopsis

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.

Review

Spoilers Contained Below

To those who feel so much,

Gosh.

Where do I even begin?

This blog should just be Tahereh Mafi’s number one fan page because my GOSH she is one of the BEST writers I have ever had the honor to read from. If I said it once, I’ve said it a million times, she just has such a beautiful, poignant, delicate touch with words and her prose is stunning. I have no words—probably too many words—to say how much I admire and respect her as a writer and a human being. Tahereh Mafi really can do no wrong in my eyes with her writing. Every line felt like a pronouncement, felt like something special and tangible in my head, heart, and hands. She knows how to transport a reader into a scene and an emotion with just a few words. She knows how to make a reader feel like they are inside the minds of the characters and the emotions. Every breath Shadi took, I took with her. Every rain drop or sunrise Shadi saw, I saw. I was just transfixed, memorized by this book. What a work of art. What a fine piece of work. What a beauty.

I mean, how lucky are we to live in a world where we have authors like Tahereh Mafi. So lucky. It’s unfathomable. I thank her every day for sharing her stories and her writing with the world. She inspires me as a reader and a writer to get to the heart of a feeling or experience. She makes me want to be a better writer—challenges me to go outside the limits of words. I have so much admiration for the way she strings sentences and thoughts together to land a punch or an ache to the heart. I also loved how her words held such power and cadence, which made it easy to devour the book.

The whole book, style-wise and writing wise was just purely breath-taking and stunning. Absolutely.

I just want to quote the whole book.

I could gush on and on about how much I love Tahereh Mafi, but alas, we should probably delve deeper into the story.

I just want to preface before I get into the book that I highly encourage and recommend reading reviews from the Muslim community. I am not Muslim, so some of the things I talk about comes from a different perspective—not a bad perspective, of course! I just wanted to note this because books are subjective and how people connect or relate to them differ.

Anyway, Shadi is a teenager who was going through A LOT. Gosh knows teenagers already go through so much, but Tahereh Mafi said let’s put her through the meat grinder. But Shadi’s emotions were what made her very human and relatable. I was a sad teen. I think most people can say that their adolescence was a rough or challenging time—adolescence usually is. Adolescents feel emotions more prominently because their hormones are elevated, they’re figuring things out, having new experiences for the first time, and finding their identity in the world. It’s not easy. Every emotion feels amplified. I felt that with Shadi. I think Shadi is an enneagram four like me. Enneagram is a personality test with nine personality types. A four are people who are in touch with their emotions and tend to welcome sadness and to digest it. Fours are also highly creative and express their emotions through art—dance, music, poetry, writing. I don’t know, I caught a vibe that Shadi welcomed her sadness.

I wrote recently in another book review how I have come to realize that sadness and anger tend to be connected. When someone is angry about something, there can be an underlying sadness and vice versa. Sadness and anger, I feel, are closely related because they are both ways people express pain or being hurt. In history, men mostly express their pain and hurt through anger—an aggressive emotion, while women have typically expressed hurt and anger through sadness—a passive emotion. Of course, a man can express sadness and a woman can express anger, but usually it’s men who lash out in anger and women in sadness. This idea connects to gender norms that were instilled for many generations in how boys were taught that crying was weak, so they were told to hold in their tears, which made them lash out in anger. However, women felt their tears and cried more than they punched fists or yelled at others. But I think no matter how a person expresses their pain or hurt, there is anger and sadness there—just one becomes more dominant because we have gendered expressions.

I say all this because Shadi had this sorrowful, melancholy air to her. But I felt this underlying anger.

“People thought I was growing up, and perhaps I was, perhaps this was growing up—this, this, an uncertain spiral into a darkness lined with teeth.

My sadness had made me noteworthy.”

(pg. 63)

Tahereh Mafi emphasized Shadi’s sadness with perpetual rain. I wondered if she lived in Seattle because I don’t know if it rains that much in California in the winter, but I could be wrong 😅. But Shadi seemed to enjoy walking in the rain or being with nature because it felt peaceful to her—it felt like she was outside of her head and connected to the wide world. I would say I’m in tune with my sad side and I have gone through depressive periods. Whenever I felt stuck in my head or really down, I know going outside helped me because it made me feel like I was just one person in this great wide world who was going through something. Thinking about things like that made everything smaller—my emotions, my problems. Being outside helped. I also like to look up at the rain and the sun because here’s this ethereal connection I feel like sad people have to nature. I think it has to do with how healing nature can be, but also how nature holds all these metaphors or how they are constants in life when everything else feels insurmountably overwhelming.

“I moved through a clinging mist, and couldn’t really see where I was going.

Metaphors, everywhere.”

(pg. 29)

Shadi also kept everything inside.

Her bottled emotions and words came from respecting her mother and not wanting to cause any more trouble or attention.

In regards to her mom, Shadi did everything to keep things behind closed doors because she didn’t know what else to do.

“I didn’t want the world to know my secrets, didn’t want my wounds torn open for the masses, and yet, there was no escaping notice.”

(pg. 79)

Gosh, I just wanted to hug Shadi 🥺!! She was what—sixteen—and her family was going through the GRINDER and she had school, her toxic friend, a forbidden lover, a sister who wasn’t talking to her, a dad in the hospital, her mom in the closet, all this prejudiced hate as a Muslim woman—how the HECK was she supposed to know what to do or to handle all of that???? I feel bad just writing that sentence 😅. Gosh, let’s cut her a BREAK! Sis, needed it! And to be the one to hear how her mom was cutting herself, gosh, that gutted me for Shadi. That had to suck. She was just a kid. Her mom needed help, but Shadi didn’t know how to breach that line to get her mom help without the mom knowing that Shadi knew the mom was cutting herself. Gosh. I felt for her.

My heart hurt for Shadi. She literally had no one to talk to or turn to because she felt like she couldn’t tell anyone without them pitying her or thinking differently about her and her family. She needed someone to talk to just as much last the mom. My heart broke when Shadi literally took a hammer to her mom’s door after the dad made a call home to say he wasn’t coming home from the hospital anymore. I understood why the mom would be devastated by that, but gosh . . . when Shadi found her all rag doll limp and depleted, my heart hurt for her. That couldn’t be an easy sight to witness—a loved one reaching a breaking point. In that moment, Shadi shared a look with her sister and they both had a newfound understanding that they had to be there for each other because they needed to be there for the mom.

Don’t even get me started on the sister, Shayda.

Shayda and Shadi had a tense relationship, which I felt was portrayed well. I also had a tense relationship with my older sister back in high school because we were on two separate points in life. I think maybe that’s how Shayda and Shadi felt. I am still curious to what Shayda meant by she was doing her job by being proposed to? Because it felt like Shayda was also tired and harboring this sadness like Shadi and both were too caught up in their own unwavering sadness that they didn’t feel like they could talk to the other. I have a hunch that Shayda was being proposed to even if she didn’t want to because she was helping her family during these tough times—doing her duties as the daughter. I do give Shayda credit for being the grown-up and semi caretaker of Shadi during this time even if Shadi didn’t always see what Shayda was doing for her. Similar to the dad and Mehdi, Shayda and Shadi had this unyielding nature to them.

” . . . but my dad had been so focused on the differences between them that he never seemed to understand that they were also the same.

Unyielding.

My father tried to break him, so my brother became water. my father tried to contain him, so my brother became the sea.”

(pg. 121)

The dad and Mehdi were stubborn and set in their ways—they would not back down from a challenge and would do what they wanted in the end. I understood that, but when two strong personalities or people are both unwavering, heads tend to collide and people get hurt.

Mehdi passed away in a car accident one angry day.

The dad got worked up about finding alcohol in Mehdi’s car and thought a spiral of negative thoughts about his son—that he was selling drugs, sleeping around, he was an alcoholic, smoking cigarettes. Mehdi was in college, so he was a legal adult to do whatever the heck he wanted to do, but I understood that their family dynamic was different. Shadi’s family values the family as an entity because the family felt like a unit of respect and harmony to them no matter what. So Mehdi having alcohol in his car made the dad think his son was a sinful, rebellious child. But the dad believed more in rules rather than faith. Shadi believed in faith.

This is where her dad and her sister differed. Shayda and the dad believed in rules. Shayda sided with the dad because Shayda thought the dad was right to be angry at Mehdi for having alcohol and all these things. They saw him as actively being a bad child. But that made me wonder, why was Mehdi acting out? Was it because he had all this pressure on him as an older sibling? Was he going through something hard? I don’t know. I would have liked to know more about Mehdi and who he was before everything went down with the dad. We had this one nice moment in the beginning where Mehdi was being a typical brother—not wanting to give Shadi a ride to school—but other than that, I don’t feel like we got to know Mehdi all that much to understand his choices. I would have liked to see why he did what he did and what kind of brother he was to Shadi that she would have this unwavering love for him. Suffice to say, Shadi believed in faith, love, compassion, and forgiveness. She didn’t believe that Mehdi deserved what happened to him. I think part of her also might blame herself and that was why she was also sorrowful and angry. She was the one who gave the dad keys to Mehdi’s car when he wasn’t using it to drive to school yet. I don’t think it was Shadi’s fault or the dad’s. I think the dad could have for sure handled the situation better by being more compassionate and understanding of his son—trusting.

There was something I heard recently in how that it’s better to just talk about things like sex, alcohol, or drugs to teens or kids when the conversation or time comes up and to be a figure where the teen or kid doesn’t feel scared to go to. What I mean by that is that if someone expresses an interest in going to a party when they’re in high school and there was a parent, the parent can assume the party will have drinks. The parent can tell the child that, “Hey, there might be drinks at this party, I don’t want you drinking, but if you do drink, call me to pick you up. I don’t want you driving home drunk or going home with someone drunk,” or something like that. That way the teen or kid can at least feel comfortable knowing that the parent isn’t someone they have to fear or hide things from. I don’t know if that makes sense, I just heard it on a podcast and I thought that was an interesting point they brought up. Because teens hide things when they feel scared of being punished or judged, but giving them a window to talk to them or feel comfortable is better than having them sneak around and get hurt. I don’t know, I’m not a parent 😅. You can ignore my target.

Anyways, I just thought if the dad opened up in this way, maybe Mehdi wouldn’t have felt attacked or hurt by his parents. I felt like that’s what the conversation felt like—an attack.

The mom was grieving her son because she let him slip away. I think she also blamed herself and she lived with that hurt and pain. That had to hurt beyond words for a mother because she probably was thinking it was her job to love and protect her son. She chased him down the street, so it’s not like she gave up on him. But gosh I felt sad for the mom. Also, now she was going through everything with her husband in the hospital.

GOSH.

The part that kind of rubbed me the wrong was how Shadi hoped her dad would pass away. That was kind of too morbid and off putting of a thought for me. I guess when a person is in their teens and they have very potent emotions, an emotion like that wasn’t technically far off for her. But I don’t know . . . it was a morbid thought. I understood why she felt that way. She blamed her dad for getting overworked and angry at Mehdi and for having his unyielding nature that drove Mehdi away in the first place. I get it. She was hurting and she was angry and she was sad.

“September of last year, my heart had been left for dead under an avalanche of emotion delivered in triplicate.

Love. Hate. Grief.

Three different blows delivered in quick succession.”

(pg. 82)

GOSH, was this one of my favorite lines from the book 👌🏼!

She was going THROUGH it!

The thing was, I didn’t think the dad was a bad person. I think he reacted terribly to a situation, but he wasn’t a terrible person.

When the dad did go home in the end, I liked the intimate moment when he looked in Shadi’s eyes and could feel her hate readapting out of every pore of her body. And he knew that. He went over to her and hugged her and told her how sorry he was and how he regretted that day. It’s probably not what Shadi wanted to hear, but I think it helped her to know that her dad recognized that he was wrong. Him saying she regretted his reaction made her probably re-question everything she knew about her dad. I don’t know how her dad got better all of a sudden when the mom just got a call saying they weren’t going to release him from the hospital. I would have liked to have known more about that. His return seemed very sudden in that way.

I don’t think Shadi and her dad will make up overnight—-things won’t just go back to “normal.” But I think the dad wants to do better for Shadi and his family to mend the hurt they have been all feeling. I also don’t think Shadi will forgive the dad that easily. When someone carries so much hurt and anger and pain in their heart, it takes twice as long to heal the broken parts and piece them together. The family needs to work on healing together and to stop keeping secrets from each other because it’s obvious they all need some sort of professional help—-not in a bad way, but in a I-care-about-them-so-much-and-want-them-to-be-heal-way. Because I do want that for them.

“Death demanded we question the privately held, still-forming philosophies that shaped our hearts. We studied one another’s weak flesh and festering minds in the harsh, unflattering light of a midday sun, and when the moon rose, we’d found ourselves alone on different quadrants of the earth. I stood as far away from my sister as my mother did from my father, and I’d spend the last year trying and failing to bridge those distances.

The trouble was, I was often the only one making the effort.”

(pg. 139)

However, I will say that I think the unresolved family emotions were done on purpose to highlight that not all families are perfect and sometimes we don’t know if they will be, but that’s life. Sometimes families grow up and grow apart and that’s natural as hard as that may sound. I know in my family, my relatives all do their own thing and I don’t see them much. Even with my brothers and sisters, they have their own lives and beliefs and we don’t always see each other or see eye to eye. But it’s the trying part—-the effort—that matters when it comes to family. If a person really wants to keep a family going, it takes effort. All relationships take effort.

“It seemed my constant companion, this feeling, this word.

Terror.

It haunted me, tormented me, terror, terrifying, terrorist, terrorism, these were my definitions in the dictionary along with my face and surname, first name, date of birth.”

(pg. 79)

When I read that quote, I was like WOW. Tahereh Mafi struck again 💙.

I was a baby when 9/11 happened, so I can’t attest to what people felt when it happened. As I grew up and learned what 9/11 was, my heart was very heartbroken for all the families and lives lost in such a tragic event. But I also hurt for the way many people villainized a whole community based on the actions of a few. I understand that there was fear and fear drives people to doing things they might not be proud of or making harsh decisions, but I think putting everyone in the Muslim community as bad people was absolutely not okay.

“Everywhere I went strangers quintet at me, minds buffering for all of half a second before they placed my entire person in a box, taped it shut.”

(pg. 32)

People are presumptuous about everything.

It’s natural, but we have to catch ourselves when we start to have these assumptions to ask ourselves why that is. With each culture, ethnicity, race, gender, etc., there are always ideas people have in their head about a certain group that it gives no room for that group to grow in that person’s mind—some people can be very set in their ideas. As a minority Asian woman, I know what it’s like to be put in a box of having to be smart or a nurse or generally quiet or whatever. Being a woman, I am put in a box of being someone who likes to cook, clean, likes make-up, and clothes and all these stereotypical gender norms. But no one belongs in a box and no one fits in a box.

I have a few friends who are Muslim and I don’t think anything terrible about them because they are some of the kindest, full-of-life, and loving people I know. But it goes back to that fear. When people don’t understand something, they get scared, they get angry, and then they get hateful. What I never understood was if someone was scared of something, why lash out in anger rather than talk to someone or ask someone about what they fear so they can understand it better because if the fear comes from not knowing, then wouldn’t reaching out to understand be helpful? I also don’t think the media helps at all when it comes to putting people in a box. The media can be a driving reason that so many people fear certain cultures, ethnicities, races, genders, religions. The media paints out an image it wants to portray to the world and people buy into it when heard enough because what else are they going to listen to when things feel chaotic in the world. People turn on the news for some semblance of peace or to understand what’s happening in the world, but the news just entices fear in people. It creates fear and hate—perpetuates it. I know the media has done this with Black lives in how the news paints white lives as less villainous than black lives when it comes to equal or worse crimes. I read somewhere once for one of my college classes how the news creates fear around black communities by writing black communities in a negative light so it gives people a reason to think they fear these communities—hence creating a targeted narrative. When I read that, I was disgusted with America because why the freak would we do such a thing to people? Then, again, it is America. It just breaks my heart to see time and time again the same people getting harped on because of the color of their skin when their crimes aren’t as worse as some of the crimes I hear white people do all the time. Racism in all matters is real, and the news hides the issues and instills fear to who they want us to fear. I also learned from a college class how there was one war (I forget which) where the U.S. wanted to go to war with and to justify that, the U.S. staged a ship being blown up and blamed it on the country they wanted to go to war with just so the public would have a reason to know why the U.S. would go to war with said country. I remember my teacher also talked about how the news played up all this propaganda to get the U.S. people to hate this opposing country so that people would want to go to war. When I heard that, I was like WHAT THE FREAK? Why? I just couldn’t believe such vileness and maliciousness to spin American’s to want to start a war with another country just because the media wanted to get the people’s support. There’s so much wrong with that. And there’s so much wrong with the media and what it portrays. I don’t like listening to the news or reading the news because it’s all a bunch of bias sometimes.

Shadi also read a lot of newspapers—-to stay informed or to know??? I don’t know. Newspapers were a tantalizing thing for Shadi because I think she didn’t want to know what was being said about her community, but she also wanted to know what was going on in the world. I thought reading the newspaper all the time probably wasn’t the healthiest for her mental health, but I understood her need to know. She wasn’t wrong for wanting to stay informed about two parts of her life. That’s something else, I loved that Tahereh Mafi explored—being part of two cultures or worlds.

“I lived, always, on the uncertain plane of a hyphen.”

(pg. 175)

Someone give Tahereh Mafi a mic so she can drop it!

Wow wow wow wow wow.

That’s how to write a sentence 👏🏼.

My gosh, did I feel that quote. I know what it’s like to live on the uncertain plane of a hyphen. People judge you because they think you’re not good enough or just enough to be part of one thing or the other thing and it never feels like there is a place where you are accepted or where you belong. The more I have thought about it over the years, people should accept you no matter the hyphens you have because why would someone turn someone else away to their own culture or community? It just feels wrong. The way I think about it is let’s say there’s a high school club and they want more people to be in their club. Others want to join, but yet the members in the club turn them away because they’re not “enough” of what they are looking for in the club. How are they supposed to grow the club if they don’t let others into the club just because of a stupid standard? No one’s going to join the club and there will be no one in the club if they don’t let people into the club. I don’t know if that makes sense, and I apologize if it doesn’t. It makes sense in my head 😅. Going back to cultures and communities, I believe everyone should be welcoming of people who are hyphenated because there is a part of them that belongs to that culture and community and who are others to make them feel wrong for that. Or to stop them from exploring their culture or community fully without feeling like they aren’t enough? Why do we exclude people so quickly when we should be the very ones to welcome them into the world?

I recently read From Little Tokyo, With Love by Sarah Kuhn and it talked about the sentiment of how we should be accepting of people in our cultures and communities who are halfies (as Sarah Kuhn calls them in her book). When I read that, I was like, “YEA!” People already feel like outsiders, what he heck are people going to turn away people who should be on the inside? Why are we sooooo judgmental about that?

I digress.

I could only imagine what Shadi and her family experienced post 9/11. I would have liked to feel more from how Shadi felt because I do think this book could have been easily set in the current day because it didn’t really feel like 2003. But I liked the Toys R Us theme song moment because that was a throwback for sure! When I read that scene, I was like, “Gosh, remember the days when people would go to a toy store and that would be the most exciting thing ever.” Nowadays, it’s mostly about technology, which is sad. I do think we got to walk inside Shadi’s shoes a bit for how difficult it was for her to be a Muslim woman post 9/11. I couldn’t believe the AUDACITY of these people from school had to freaking HARASS Shadi by pushing her against a car and telling her to go back to where she came from?????? I WANTED TO FIGHT for her 😡!! How about these people go back to where they came from as well because as long as they’re not Native Americans, they shouldn’t be talking 🙃. And the AUDACITY they had to laugh at her because they thought she didn’t no English, made me want to scream for Shadi. What got me was how much more angry they were to think Shadi didn’t know English and to have done this whole spiel against her. What is wrong with people?

“I felt my heart grow harder as I moved through the halls, felt it get heavier.

One day, I worried, it would simply fall out.”

(pg. 115)

It breaks my heart to think people have experienced what Shadi did, and still do.

It just truly broke my heart that Shadi felt so tired because she felt like the world was against her and so many people hated or blamed people like her, that her heart was so heavy. She felt so heavy from the weight of the world against her and her own troubles that she was exhausted. It felt like Shadi just didn’t want to fight or couldn’t fight any more because she was only a teen and was so exhausted from the world cursing her name and everything she stood for. I am beyond sorry if you have ever been harassed like Shadi or felt like the world hated you, I am so sorry. You do not deserve to feel like that—to feel like you are nothing but a cockroach or a nuisance people hate. You deserve love, compassion, understanding, empathy, and care.

I hope people’s heart’s change because people come from all walks of life and identities and no matter where they come from or who they are, it doesn’t change the fact that everybody deserves happiness, good health, and love. I think if more people understood that we are all trying to live the best life we can and do the best we can, we would have more humanity to let go of our anger, hate, fears, or differences to live as one, accepting as one.

By no means am I trying to diminish any identity, but I am saying we can all live together being different—having different identities, genders, cultures, races, religions, etc.—if we all allowed ourselves to just live and stop fearing, hating, and being angry at each other.

It also made my heart hurt when Shadi talked about how people from her Mosque would get called by FBI agents to see if anyone was a “traitor.” Isn’t that some kind of legal violation of sorts? Don’t the people at the Mosque have a right not to speak to these FBI agents if they didn’t want to? I just felt so disgusted with how Muslims were treated and how they are treated today. Somethings got to change—people’s attitudes and beliefs. There was something Tahereh Mafi also wrote that stood out to me:

“There is no such thing as an Islamic terrorist.

It was morally impossible—philosophically impossible—to be Muslim and a terrorist at the same time. There was nothing in Islam that condoned the taking of innocent lives. And yet there it was, every day, every day, the conflation: Muslim terrorist. Islamic terrorist.”

(pg. 33)

I think this goes back to the media painting a biased negative image for all Muslims and Islamic people—or well, in the American sense. Because when I think about it now, the way Tahereh Mafi wrote this quote was connecting two groups of people to a negative word and the media had linked these two groups for so long they have become synonymous—they have become feared. Because I think the real word to fear is terrorist. That’s the fear. But attaching the word Muslim and Islamic added a whole other sense of unneeded and wrongful terror to an already terrible word and it just perpetuates this fear.

It’s wrong.

It needs to stop.

Because there shouldn’t be something synonymous about the two words.

There was also expectations in Shadi’s own community that I found similar to most cultures too. The judgment of women 😆.

“My face. My body. So many women–always the women, only the women—talked about me, dissected me, my skin, my waist, the size of my feet, the slope of my nose, my eyes my eyes my eyes my eyes.”

(pg. 62)

Something I noticed over the years through experience and books, was how every time someone makes a comment about a person’s appearance, it’s a woman. A man will typically compliment how a woman dresses, but it’s a woman who dissects another woman or man piece by piece and will always have something to say—usually it’s negative. It’s what I’ve noticed in most Asian cultures and American culture. It’s disheartening to realize how many women do this because I feel like women care more about appearances to make another person feel bad about themself. I think women saying comments about someone else’s body and appearance comes from past hurt—a cycle of women poking and prodding everything about them. My honest to gosh advice is that no one should be complimenting your body, yet alone saying something about it. If it’s not their body, it’s not their business. Women need to stop tearing each other down and lift each other up instead. Or say something nice like, “You look happier or how have you been. Or you look like you’re glowing.” Or something other than, “Oh, you look like you got big.”

Anyway, I can’t even fathom how she balanced school on top of everything.

I just want to applaud Shadi for trying to keep up with school because if I was her, I would have felt burnt out and overwhelmed. I could understand the pressure she felt to maintain a good academic standing, and when that starts to slip away, it feels catastrophic. It also feels like you’re not only letting yourself down, but your family. It’s more than academic pressure when it feels like that.

But excuse me, while the teacher in me comes out to POPs off for a minute 🤪!

THE FREAKING AUDACITY of this teacher who RAGGED on Shadi’s butt in the middle of class because she fell asleep?????????!!?!?!?!??!?!!? OOOOOOOH, I WANTED TO THROW DOWN 😂!!! Who gave him his teaching license? My gosh.

I’m not even joking, no teacher would EVER (or I hope) just drop a book on a student’s desk if a student fell asleep in the middle of class, and no teacher would EVER (or I hope) shame a student for doing so. I was soooo mad. What got me even more fired up was not that he dropped a textbook on her text to wake her up—even though that too was a shizzy thing to do—-it was the fact that this teacher was sooooo presumptuous to say Shadi “wanted to stay up late and how that was not his problem.” I’M SORRY ☹️????

I WAS APPALLED.

YOU HEARTLESS PIECE OF TRASH.

He had no idea what she was going through. He was out of line to embarrass her and then make assumptions.

I am in my last year for my education program, and even I know to have more freaking compassion than this teacher had. He had noooooo idea what Shadi was going through that made her so exhausted to go to school every day. If the teachers in her life actually cared about her, they would have noticed the depressive signs in Shadi to reach out to her to ask her if she was okay. They would have also picked up on her slipping grades to talk to her to see if something was going on at home. And if they knew—-and all teachers know—that Shadi and her family recently lost someone, they would be more compassionate and understanding to ask her how she was doing and to make sure she was okay. I don’t understand how her teachers never picked up all these obviously blaring signs that she wasn’t okay and she was struggling at home. It was all there!! If I was her teacher, I would have noticed 👌🏼. This teacher needs to be removed from the premises 😆. I will remove him for Shadi. Literally no one knows what a person is going through and we can never assume what a person is experiencing. I know many teachers get students from all walks of life and they have to know their students to be in tune with how they are feeling or what they might be going through. It’s a teacher’s intuition. And Shadi needed an adult figure in her life to recognize that.

Gosh, but when she fainted because she was exhausted, I wanted to hold her! I felt how tired she was 🥺.

You know who was my absolute favorite character in this book?

Noah.

Noah should have had more book time! I loved him! He was such a nice, sweet, funny dude, and he was so kind to Shadi when other people weren’t. I loved how he first came across as a creepy stalker, but then cleared the air as being Muslim and how the mom wanted him to be friends with Shadi. I thought that was cute because the mom telling him to be friends with her felt like something a first grader’s mom would tell their son or daughter on the first day of school. It seemed like Noah and his mom had a good relationship. I also liked how Noah balanced Shadi’s darkness and gave her a reprieve to smile. He was the only other person who ever brought out the joy in Shadi, and I loved seeing her smile or be happy—those glimpses of her feeling partially okay were so rare and sweet. I also loved how Noah went out of his way to be there for her. He brought his newspaper and everything so he could have lunch with her. I loved that! I also would have liked to see him go to the Mosque with Noah because that would have been a cute scene to see. They had such a cool dynamic and I was happy she had a friend like him who also wanted her to be okay.

A legit good dude! 💙 A legit good dude who was also a legit good friend.

Because we all know Zahra wasn’t a real friend.

I loved that Tahereh Mafi explored friendship breakups and unhealthy friendships because that’s what many teens go through. I went through my first friendship break-up at the end of high school, and I never even knew what that was until I went through it.

“My problem was that I didn’t know friendships could have an expiration date at all.”

(pg. 164)

No one ever talked about friendship break-ups when I was in high school, and it’s not something most people talk about still. We all know the romantic break-up and the divorce sort of break-up, but not friends. It’s so much harder to lose a friend because they are people we create this stronger relationship with so much history that it feels like we lose family when we lose a friend. Friendship is also a deeper and different bond than a romantic relationship in a lot of ways where we miss the person so much more because of the memories and trust we have for that person. I don’t know. When my friend and I broke up, I remember feeling like I lost a limb because she was someone I knew for a long time and she was one of the people I felt like I could be myself around without judgment. She knew my quirks and my embarrassing moments. She knew my happy and my saddest moments too. I knew hers and then some, so for us to just stop being friends hurt a lot. I wanted to talk to her, I wanted to forgive her. But I knew we had drifted apart and become different people that being friends wasn’t healthy for both of us. No one tells you how hard it is.

It’s hard to break-up with a friend, but I guarantee you that it gets easier and you will find other people.

I also want to say that I truly believe some people come into your life for a reason for a season. I think about this quote a lot when it comes to my friend I broke away from because we were right for each other’s life when we were in it. But our relationship grew unhealthy when we both grew differently. And it wasn’t a bad growth and she wasn’t a bad person—isn’t a bad person—she was just different. The me I was then didn’t feel like I could be friends with the person she was then. It was (I think) mutual. But she taught me so many things I am beyond grateful for. She taught me to be proud of who I am and to not be afraid to be a little bit silly or crazy. She also taught me compassion, kindness, and confidence. Sometimes I think about her and if we could be friends again and I don’t know. I would like to think we can because of how much I will always love and appreciate her as a friend, but I also remember the other not so good moments we had that led to our break-up. It’s hard. But I think if we were meant to be friends again, it will happen.

Shadi and Zahra’s friendship didn’t feel healthy for a long time, and I think Shadi excused Zahra’s friendship because she wanted someone to understand her or she wanted to hold onto someone familiar to her. But Zahra never respected Shadi or made her feel appreciated whatsoever. I could tell by the way Shadi talked about Zahra that Shadi knew Zahra wasn’t a good friend. I get it, though. Zahra was insecure because all her other friends used her to get close to her hot brother, Ali. So she was on edge and paranoid about every friend she ever had. In all honesty, that’s a Zahra problem and she should get professional help to work through her paranoia because if she didn’t, I don’t see how anyone would want to be her friend. She needs to trust people and not be so worried about what they think about her brother. I get it, no one likes to be used, but treating someone poorly because she didn’t want to be used, wasn’t the way. I also thought it wouldn’t be easy for anyone to be her friend in the future if all she did was stomp on them when it comes to her family or her brother. I mean, why would she constantly barrage Shadi with all these questions about why she was coming over to her house and yada yada yada. SIS, Shadi was your friend, it’s not weird if she wanted to go to your house to spend time with you! Not everyone has a motive.

I recently was listening to the Anything Goes podcast (Advice Episode 4) and there was a question about relationships. I thought Emma Chamberlain’s advice was spot-on. She said to not treat a relationship based on a past relationship—don’t think every relationship will be similar to your past relationship. To me that meant, don’t assume that things will happen—good or bad—in this relationship that happened in previous ones. In Zahra’s case she needed to know that just because people in the past had used her for her brother, doesn’t mean she should have treated her current relationship with Shadi poorly. Emma Chamberlain also said something along the lines of let the relationship be and let them prove you wrong. Zahra could guard her heart and be cautious, of course, but I think she should have just enjoyed her friendship with her friend without assuming or wanting to assume the worst. She should have let Shadi prove her wrong.

“Zahra had always hated me, just a little bit. She’d always said it like it was a joke, a charming turn of a phrase, like it was normal to roll your eyes and say every other day, Gosh I hate you so much, to the person who was, ostensibly your best friend . . .I think, deep down, I’d always known we wouldn’t last.

What I hadn’t realized was how paranoid she’d become over the years, how she’d already painted upon my face a picture of her own insecurities.”

(pg. 101)

Instead, Zahra believed that Shadi would do her dirty—be a traitor—and she was so prepared for the shoe to drop that she created a self-fulfilling prophecy that Shadi would betray her. That that was all she would ever believe and no one could convince her otherwise. She was just waiting for Shadi to slip up. That’s not a friendship.

I will say, yes, sometimes people in friendships can have a bit of jealousy. But it’s never a hate kind of jealousy, but if it does come to that, that’s when it’s unhealthy. Zahra was jealous of Shadi in every way, which was unfair to her because that’s not like it was Shadi’s problem. What was interesting was how Zahra had everything Shadi could have wanted—a nice, loving family and supportive parents—-while Zahra wanted everything Shadi had—-good looks, an affable personality.

The constant question I had in the beginning before we learned why, was why she didn’t want Shadi to date her brother? Like, I didn’t see the big deal 😅. Most friends would encourage dating the brother because a best friend and a brother is a BFB. SO I was confused. It really wasn’t a big deal, but again, it tied back to Zahra’s insecurity even with her brother because her brother was good looking and got everything he wanted, so she wanted friends for herself. I get it. I didn’t like it, but I got it.

What I didn’t get though, was why the FREAK Shadi still was loyal to Zahra when they obviously weren’t even friends anymore? Shadi, who cares if you start dating Ali, you ain’t friends with Zahra 🤪! Go get your mans!!

What Ali said really stuck out to me.

“‘Tell me something, Shadi–what kind of best friend doesn’t want you to be happy? What kind of best friend doesn’t care if she hurts you? What kind of best friend denies you the right o make decisions for yourself?'”

(pg. 131)

A GOSH AWFUL FRIEND that’s who!

Ali preach it 👏🏼!

If Zahra were really her friend, she would have wanted Shadi to be happy and she would have put aside her anger and jealousy to let her friend be happy. But no.

The only people who genuinely cared about Shadi were Ali and Noah.

Ali.

Ali seemed like such a sweet boy too 🥰. I mean, the dude kept asking Shadi if she was okay and he knew that when Shadi said she was, she actually wasn’t. He was also very kind for constantly looking after Shadi after she broke his heart because she didn’t want to hurt him. I like how he gave her a ride when it was raining or how he purposefully dropped by her house to return her backpack. I also liked how he didn’t tell anyone what she was going through because he wanted to respect her privacy until she told him about what was going on. But no matter how much Shadi did or did not divulge, I loved how Ali was still there for her. That’s the kind of friend everyone needs—someone who keeps coming back and who knows the real you. No one truly asked Shadi if she was okay besides Ali and Noah.

Also, that tension???? 😅 WOW.

There was obviously something between them. When they kissed int the bathroom, I was like LET’S GOOOO! The way Tahereh Mafi described the tension in the room was amazing. I think she built up all this tension and love (lust?) between them well.

“My head was filling with steam, my thoughts evaporating . . . I gasped when he learned in, pressed his forehead to mine. His hands were at my waist now, reeling me in, and I sank against his body with a sound, kind of like a surrender.”

My gosh, a surrender?

Wow. Tahereh Mafi doesn’t write a bad sentence.

I still don’t understand how every fictional character has abs 😂? I want a main character with a Shrek body 🤪. The thing I didn’t get about their massive make-out scene in Zahra’s room–where Shadi went after she fainted and the school contacted Zahra’s parents to pick her up—was how Ali said he didn’t mean to kiss her the first time, and then he kissed her again 🤪. Excuse me bro, if you didn’t mean to kiss her the first time, why the freak were you kissing her the second time? And don’t tell me you didn’t mean to 😂! Bro meant to kiss her. I found it funny that she locked I’m in the bathroom after they kissed. Ummmm, what the heck—she put Ali in a time out. Haha. I also laughed when Tahereh described Ali as his breath was getting heavy before they kissed. I don’t know, in my mind, I pictured huffing and puffing 😂. I am awkward. Just joking, I got to make reading fun for me.

When she kissed Ali in Zahra’s room, Shadi finally let go of Zahra being her friend. I thought that was kind of confusing because wouldn’t she just have dropped her as her friend the first time? I don’t know, I guess I understand it though—Shadi held out hope that she and Zahra could be friends again if she played her cards right and ignored Ali.

But I loved that after a while, Shadi realized how much she needed to let go of Zahra because a real friend wouldn’t treat her the way Zahra did.

“Once I understood that she’d ejected me without so much as a good-bye, I’d not possessed the self-hatred necessary to beg her to stick around. . . . I’d learned from my mother to hide the pain that mattered most, to allow it an audience behind closed doors, with only God as my witness. I had other friends, I knew other people. I was not desperate for company.”

(pg. 97)

Good for Shadi. She shouldn’t keep friends around just because she felt like she needed someone.

I loved how hospitable Zahra and Ali’s parents were. They really took Shadi in and made her feel like a daughter. I also loved the letter Shadi wrote to the parents a long time ago, thanking them for caring for her. I loved that because we got to see a sweet, sensitive side to Shadi—-the person behind this sorrowful, confused disposition. After kissing Ali, Shadi wanted to leave before things got awkward with Zahra and she didn’t want to overstay, so she went home where her dad was now.

“I didn’t know how she could love a complicated man without it complicating her love.”

(pg. 239)

I love a good quote that plays on words.

The quote above was such a stellar sentence because sometimes we love people so much, even if they are complicated, and sometimes other people wonder how a person can be loved when they are so complex. It can be hard not to look at a person and forget all the complexities or hurt they caused—-how Shadi looked at her father and loved and hated him at the same time, but Shayda loved him. I think it’s testament to how complicated family love can be sometimes—unconditional love.

At the end, Shadi ran away under the very real excuse she left her backpack at Zahra’s house and needed to get it. But Shadi went to the park to jump in the pool to scream her head out. It was her way of releasing everything she held in all the time because she did everything to be a good daughter and not cause trouble or draw attention to herself. So that meant not yelling, talking back, fighting back, causing a scene—no matter how hard she wanted to. I felt like that wasn’t healthy for her, but I thought it was fitting she screamed in a pool because it made me think about how even her release was silent. Her jumping in the pool also reminded me of the quote with how Shadi felt like she was drowning. I’m glad Ali found her at the pool because her jumping into a pool in the middle of the night to scream felt highly worrisome for many different reasons.

I liked that she and Ali were going to give Ali and her a chance now because Zahra wasn’t her friend and things were kind of getting better. The thing was I didn’t feel a lot of resolution with AEOGD. There were just many things that I would have liked more closer with because it felt like the story was just getting started at the end. I would have liked to know more about how the mom, dad, Shayda, and Shadi were going to mend as a family. Was the dad going to go back to the hospital again or was he going to be a better father? Are Shayda and Shadi ever going to become closer? Will the mom get professional help? Will Shadi go away for college to escape her parents/family? What about Shadi’s friendship with Noah? How were Ali and Shadi going to be in a relationship when Zahra finds out?

I had many questions. However, I read somewhere that the ending wasn’t supposed to have a lot of resolution to symbolize how not every story wraps things up neatly, but it leaves room for hope and mystery for Shadi in where she goes next. The story ends abruptly because sometimes that is what the teenage years are—-it’s one thing after another and then all you could hope for is that things look hopeful or that things might be okay. That’s what Tahereh Mafi did—provided the possibility of hope. I didn’t really feel the hope that much in the end because I had all these questions, but I appreciate and respect the sentiment of a meaningful ending.

I also loved discovering what Shadi meant.

“Shadi meant joy, and all I ever did was cry.”

(pg. 247)

As I read the book, I kept wondering why the book was called An Emotion of Great Delight when it seems like the exact opposite of delight 🤔. I don’t know what the title means, but to me it meant the emotions Shadi felt greatly in her life. The way I saw it was delight could be another word of joy, aka Shadi. And Shadi struck me as someone who felt every emotion greatly based on how she described every moment and how I felt her sorrow, anger, and glimpses of joy in spurts. But she feels things deeply and greatly, just like most teens do. I hope she does find happiness because she deserves to, but sadness, anger, and other emotions are things to be ashamed or afraid of because they are great too. If an emotion wasn’t meant to be felt, we wouldn’t feel it. This was Shadi’s emotional journey and for the most part it was, yes, sad, but it could also be delightful in the way that we know things do get better and that’s what we can hope for for her and the other characters. Well, that was my interpretation.

Again, Tahereh Mafi astounds me with her writing and I thought she wrote a poignant story with so much heart and emotion that people will definitely feel something for 💙.

Anyway, what was your favorite part of the book? Least favorite part? Anything I mentioned that you want to discuss more about? 

How are you feeling today? Let me know below in the comments as I love hearing from you all 💕

I hope you have a beautiful day whenever and wherever you might be reading this 😊.

And as always, with love,

Rating

5 Full Bloom Flowers

Characters: Shadi is a powerful young woman with the weight of the world on her shoulders and deserves all the hugs and love in the world

Writing: Phenomenal and stunning. I truly believe Tahereh Mafi is one of the strongest writers I’ve ever read 🥰

Plot: The story has a very despondent and melancholy mood with the complexities friendship, family, and love.

Romance: Tense, emotional, and complicated