By Hena Khan
A shy Pakistani American girl feels her best friend drifting away, and then her family's mosque is broken into and vandalized.
Amina is a shy sixth grader in Milwaukee. Her family is Pakistani American and Muslim, and their Islamic center is the center of their week. She has a beautiful singing voice but freezes at the thought of anyone hearing it. Two worries arrive at once. Her best friend Soojin, who's Korean American, starts talking about changing her name to something that sounds more American, and about spending time with Emily, a girl Amina has always kept at a distance. Amina can feel their oldest friendship coming loose. Then the Islamic center is broken into and vandalized overnight, and the whole community has to decide how to answer it. In the middle of all of it, Amina finds that the voice she's been hiding is the thing that helps.
This is one of the fullest novels on the trail, a real step up into sustained chapters, and it carries a child there without ever feeling like homework. The friendship thread does most of the pulling: watching a best friend drift toward someone new is a hurt a lot of children this age know firsthand, and Khan writes it with real tenderness. Around it sits a specific, lived-in world, a warm Pakistani American Muslim family, a mosque community, the ordinary work of belonging to two cultures at once. Some children will see their own family on the page; others will get a close look at one unlike theirs. The vandalism gives the story genuine stakes without turning frightening, and Amina's shyness is drawn well enough that you feel the risk every time she thinks about singing.