Description
Razia Mirza grows up amid the wild grape vines and backyard sunflowers of Corona, Queens, with her best friend, Saima, by her side. When a family rift drives the girls apart, Razia’s heart is broken. She finds solace in Taslima, a new girl in her close-knit Pakistani-American community. They embark on a series of small rebellions: listening to scandalous music, wearing miniskirts, and cutting school to explore the city.
When Razia is accepted to Stuyvesant, a prestigious high school in Manhattan, the gulf between the person she is and the daughter her parents want her to be, widens. At Stuyvesant, Razia meets Angela and is attracted to her in a way that blossoms into a new understanding. When their relationship is discovered by an Aunty in the community, Razia must choose between her family and her own future.
Punctuated by both joy and loss, full of ’80s music and beloved novels, Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion is a new classic: a fiercely compassionate coming-of-age story of a girl struggling to reconcile her heritage and faith with her desire to be true to herself.
Kacie Beatty @epredovic_140
January 24, 2023
5
I really enjoyed the writing, which was beautiful and tender at times, quippy at others, and solemn when it needed to be. The author captured quite a lot of nuance, which I appreciated. One spoiler-free example is the way the yards are described in Corona. The initial descriptions tell us that the old Italian inhabitants kept beautiful flower gardens that they tended meticulously. When the Pakistani families moved in they stopped gardening, and the yards became overgrown and wild. At first it is framed as a negative, an explanation for why the old Italian neighbors disliked them. But later Razia notes that in Pakistan the natural growth was beautiful, unencumbered, and free. That was what their parents knew their whole lives, so they had no reason to think they should change now.