Amina’s Voice by Hena Khan (review)

No amount of persuasion and support from her best friend, Soojin, can get Amina to volunteer for a singing solo in the sixth-grade concert. That’s only the beginning of Amina’s middle-school insecurities, as Soojin, preparing to become a citizen, is thinking of changing her name, and she’s inviting blonde Emily, who teased Amina and Soojin in elementary school, to become their friend. Amina’s mild personal worries take a back seat when their community’s mosque is vandalized; her friends all come together in an interfaith effort to rebuild, and Amina finds the courage to take the stage after all. This gentle example of multicultural domestic realism hits all of the right notes—Amina is a meek, sensitive girl reasonably apprehensive about the new expectations that come with middle school, especially as she sees her older brother getting in trouble as he reaches beyond their parents’ comfort zone. Soojin is a gifted encourager, prompted by her long-awaited citizenship status to embrace some of the same changes that Amina resists, including forgiving the slights of the past and accepting offers of friendship at face value. Khan does a nice job of integrating Amina’s parents’ anxieties unobtrusively into the narrative; her father longs for the approval of his strict older brother and hopes the good behavior of his Americanized children will earn it. Meanwhile, Amina’s uncle learns, along with Amina, that America can still be a welcoming place to be a Muslim despite its problems, a message that is overtly stated and implicitly reinforced by the community support that follows the vandalism, offering a comforting counternarrative to what young readers may see on the news.