Description: Shabnam Qureshi is a funny, imaginative Pakistani-American teen attending a tony private school in suburban New Jersey. When her feisty best friend, Farah, starts wearing the headscarf without even consulting her, it begins to unravel their friendship. After telling a huge lie about a tragedy that happened to her family during the Partition of India in 1947, Shabnam is ready for high school to end. She faces a summer of boredom and regret, but she has a plan: Get through the summer. Get to college. Don’t look back. Begin anew.
  Everything changes when she meets Jamie, who scores her a job at his aunt’s pie shack, and meets her there every afternoon. Shabnam begins to see Jamie and herself like the rose and the nightingale of classic Urdu poetry, which, according to her father, is the ultimate language of desire. Jamie finds Shabnam fascinating—her curls, her culture, her awkwardness. Shabnam finds herself falling in love, but Farah finds Jamie worrying.
  With Farah’s help, Shabnam uncovers the truth about Jamie, about herself, and what really happened during Partition. As she rebuilds her friendship with Farah and grows closer to her parents, Shabnam learns powerful lessons about the importance of love, in all of its forms.

Review: I had high hopes for Karim's That Thing We Call a Heart especially with two starred reviews from two esteem journals, Kirkus and the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, but unfortunately for me the book fell flat in its execution.
  Shabnam is a secular Muslim who doesn't feel any attachments to Islam or her Pakistani culture in general. She feels comfortable fading into the background and just wants to get through her senior year of high school without any incidents so she can finally live her life on her own terms in college. Shabnam's summer before college brings lots of challenges and questions. Although she and her best friend Farah were once practically sisters, there's a distance between them now that Farah has chosen to wear hijab. Farah's bold and visual stance on religion draws attention to both her and Shabnam.
  I appreciated the variation of Muslim representation in the book. I didn't mind that Shabnam was not religious but her snide running commentary got on my nerves. Her careless actions, self absorbed personality, and her spineless personality is what I disliked most about Shabnam. She would not stand up for her best friend or even for her ethnicity when they were attacked in a tasteless Islamophobic jokes. I frankly lost respect for her and I did not understand why Farah, a vibrant character, would ever be best friends with her.
 Unlike Shabnam, Farah was a much more complex character that I wished got more page time. While she wears the hijab, she also has issues with religion and Pakistani culture. She talks about her frustrations of being perceived as 'not Muslim enough for her Muslim friends and too religious to her non-Muslim friends' due to her fashion statements and actions. I would have loved to get to know more of her and I wished the book spent more time juxtaposing Shabnam and Farah as it seems to indicate in the book's description.
 Regrettably, the book spends a lot more time on Shabnam's romance with Jamie, a boy she bumps into at the mall. The romance falls completely flat and insta-lovey as Shabnam is smitten quickly by being called "beautiful" a handful of times. Jamie feels more like a plot device than a fleshed out character. He comes off as a carefree person, but to me, he felt as someone who wanted to check off 'date an exotic brown girl' off his dating bucket list. It irritated me that Shabnam is willing to sleep with Jamie despite only being acquainted with him for twelve days and not knowing anything about his past, his family, or even his present/future. Her shock of her relationship status of being a summer fling was very anticlimactic.
  Karim makes a point to include the 1947 Partition between India and Pakistan as well as including famous Urdu poets in the story, but both of these story threads would have added a much needed layer of depth to this story, but they were used superfluously and did not add much to Shabnam's character development besides maintaining her exotic status in Jamie's eyes and those of her classmates. I was really looking forward to an exploration of what it means to be a Muslim American teen in That Thing We Call a Heart, but I only found glimpses of it in this book.  

Rating: 2 stars

Words of Caution: There is some strong language, underage drinking, drug use, and crude sexual humor in the book. Recommended for Grades 9 and up.

If you like this book try: Ten Things I Hate About Me by Randa Abdel-Fattah, I Love I Hate I Miss My Sister by Amélie Sarn