Saints and Misfits

Today’s post is on Saints and Misfits by S. K. Ali. It is 325 pages long and is published by Salaam Reads. The cover is yellow at the top and becoming pink on the way down with the main character on it as she takes a picture. The intended reader is someone who likes YA novels with diverse casts and talks about tough topics. There is no foul language, talk of attempted rape, no sex, and no violence in this novel. The story is told from first person perspective of the main character Janna. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- There are three kinds of people in my world:
1. Saints, those special people moving the world forward. Sometimes you glaze over them. Or, at least, I do. They’re in your face so much, you can’t see them, like how you can’t see your nose.
2. Misfits, people who don’t belong. Like me—the way I don’t fit into Dad’s brand-new family or in the leftover one composed of Mom and my older brother, Mama’s-Boy-Muhammad.
Also, there’s Jeremy and me. Misfits. Because although, alliteratively speaking, Janna and Jeremy sound good together, we don’t go together. Same planet, different worlds.
But sometimes worlds collide and beautiful things happen, right?
3. Monsters. Well, monsters wearing saint masks, like in Flannery O’Connor’s stories.
Like the monster at my mosque.
People think he’s holy, untouchable, but nobody has seen under the mask.
Except me.

Review- The blurb for this book sounded so good but it falls flat for me. I do think that is too bad because the story is important should be told but the characters are boring, the villain is menacing like a Saturday morning cartoon bad guy not a young man who attempted to rape a close friend of his family. Janna is pretty normal teen, trying to juggle her family, her faith, her friends, her crush, and her trauma. I did like how Ali handled Janna’s flashbacks of the attack, what can trigger it, how she tried to pretend that everything’s fine when she is falling apart. But for some reason I was just bored while I was reading this book. The moments of Janna doing something interesting are out weighted by the long passages of nothing happening. It makes me feel bad to give this book a Three stars but I was so bored reading this novel.

I give this novel a Three out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.