Love, Hate and Other Filters

This book is... fine. I don't really have any praise to give it because it was a story that had some decent writing (though the inclusion of random text messages, especially within the text using different fonts and emojis or as images of some Apple-based messenger, was not a choice that I'd make). If anything, it's trying to accomplish too much at one time... and the marketing kind of fails it for what the audience expectations are set to be.

For instance, the summary blurb states that "the community [the main character]'s known since birth becomes unrecognizable; neighbours and classmates are consumed with fear, bigotry, and hatred." This is... overstated. It's not false because you can see the ways in which it takes time for the main character to find her footing and security in her community again, but the latter half makes it sound like everyone around her has become these overt racists who are out to torment her and her family (when it's primarily one boy, who dragged along two of his friends... who then left him because he started hurting the main character instead of "just scaring her"). While I can appreciate that, for an individual, that might be one way they view the world whenever racist attacks happen... It's just not an honest portrayal of the story from the book's marketing, and that genuinely does a disservice to an otherwise tolerable book.

I did glance around at other reviews, and a common thing that I kept running into were people who complained about how they wouldn't have known that the main character was Muslim if she didn't tell them. I find this perplexing because there are a lot of Muslim people, particularly secular Muslims, who... do a lot of the same things as every other non-Muslim around them. Do people expect Muslims to engage in acts of being Muslim every single second of every single day? Especially if they happen to be a teenage girl who is growing up in a small Midwestern town? Do they think that all Muslim people act the same way and that their lived realities and personal histories have no impacts on how (or whether) they practice their faith based on either other cultural markers (like being Indian, Iraqi, Indonesian, or Moroccan?) or their own personal tastes and preferences?

There are plenty of references to overtly Muslim practices that occur throughout the book, but I get the feeling that people are still othering Muslims to the point of not recognising that there are varying ways to be a Muslim person, just as there are multiple ways to be a Christian person... and sometimes some of those ways of being look the exact same when those two people exist in the same space and time.

I do find the presentation of the police to be a little too liberal-positive? But that's kind of expected in most of these books, even if off-putting when you know anything about policing (especially in the US).

But the representation of domestic terrorism is really... awkward and kind of absurd. Actually, it's really irresponsibly handled. Because there is little contradiction to some of the vignettes in the primary text (which is how the terrorist attack is portrayed), there is nothing done to highlight the problem of constantly highlighting the abuse that white supremacist terrorists endured as children whenever they engage in genuine acts of terror. While I care that people endured abuse as children, it doesn't matter when they do heinous actions against other people. His abuse as a child did not create a racist; his abuse as a child did not create a white supremacist. His abuse as a child is not a rationale for murdering dozens of people (or more) in an act of terrorism against immigrants. Because the text doesn't engage with these notions, it ends up supporting the idea that we should have sympathy for these people. It ends up supporting the hideous belief of "hurt people hurt people" and the cycle of violence, which simply aren't functional and are often weaponised in defense of white cis men (and definitely in defense of white people). There had to be a better way to handle the terrorism aspect of this book, even while keeping the (somewhat obvious) twist about the perpetrator.