86 TIME February 28/March 7, 2022
TIME OFF BOOKS
SABAA TAHIR STILL REMEMBERS WHEN A
classmate at her high school in California’s Mo-
jave Desert probed her about whether she had a
green card. The Pakistani American author re-
members countless mispronunciations of her
name. She remembers violent threats. Tahir’s
family owned an 18-room motel off the main
road of their isolated, majority-white town. Her
parents’ accents and the family’s religious tradi-
tions made them diff erent. “We felt it every day,”
says Tahir, now 38, “the things kids said to me at
school—asking questions that indicated not just a
lack of knowledge, but disdain.”
That feeling of being othered runs through
Tahir’s latest young-adult novel All My Rage, out
March 1, which closely follows two Muslim Paki-
stani American teenagers—Noor and Salahudin—
as they navigate grief, faith, love, and trauma
while coming of age in a desert community where
isolation is not only a matter of geography. “So
many of us who feel marginalized, we hold all this
anger inside, and we can’t express it without po-
tentially serious consequences,” Tahir says. Her
characters know the feeling well, and the result is
a book that brings readers closer than ever to the
celebrated author’s inner world.
Tahir broke out with An Ember in the Ashes,
a YA fantasy series about teens defying a brutal
empire that has sold more than a million copies.
All My Rage is a dramatic departure; the novel, al-
ready set to be adapted for television with Tahir
co-writing, is her fi fth, and her most personal one
to date. Writing All My Rage was “infi nitely more
diffi cult” than crafting a fantasy world, she says.
“I had to remind myself that I can’t fi x these prob-
lems with magic.”
The new book explores exactly what the title
declares: rage, not only in response to racism but
also in response to parents who fail to show up,
the ways in which addiction unravels relation-
ships, and the grief of losing the people who mat-
ter. Noor and Salahudin are high school seniors
navigating a turbulent friendship (and maybe
more) while learning what it means to be there for
each other through hardship.
All My Rage travels back and forth in time, tell-
ing the stories of the teens in present-day Cali-
fornia and Salahudin’s parents when they were
young in Pakistan. Although the book is nuanced
in its inclusion of Pakistani, Muslim, and desert
culture, it speaks to something shared by many:
the “universal experience of being in
an inescapable situation where you
have no good choices.”TAHIR TOOK 15 YEARS to write All My
Rage. Crafting a story so closely tied to
her life was a vulnerable undertaking,
and one she pursued largely in private.
“It was just this conversation I was hav-
ing with myself,” she says.
A motel setting is the most obvi-
ous tie to her reality. Tahir’s parents
worked to hold their business together
through diffi cult economic circum-
stances while raising three kids. When
Tahir was in college, her father had a
stroke and her family sold the motel.
She never got closure with a place that
had been so important, so she gave
Salahudin and his family a desert inn
of their own. “I’ve never been a person
who really thought about things like
self-love, but it took a lot of self-love to
write this book,” she says. “It was like
looking back at who I was as a child.”
She drew from several hard, for-
mative experiences. Throughout the
book, Salahudin is disappointed by
his father, who is often drunk. “He’s
looking at someone he loves, who is
just a mess, and thinking, I deserve
better than this,” says Tahir, who has△
Tahir’s fi fth novel
is her most
personal yetPROFILE
Sabaa Tahir on the
edge of a desert
BY SANYA MANSOOR