I always have a hard time explaining exactly what this book did for me. The day I finished it, I went around recommending it to all my friends and teachers. When they asked me why I loved it so much, I couldn't really put it into words right away. Here’s how I’ll try to explain it: I'm a white person who lives in a small town, even smaller than the one in this book. I don't get along very well with many of the people at my school because they consider me too liberal. I've had a hard time finding other people my age who put the same value on diversity and equality in a place that's 99% white and 100% Christian, if religion is considered to be inherited. Discussions about race and culture have become increasingly frustrating for me because I either feel uncomfortable starting them with people who are uninterested or uncomfortable joining them as a white person from a mostly white place. I felt like All My Rage is a great book to learn about systemic racism because it feels very open. As a white person reading it, I didn't feel like I was an intruder, but like I was really invited to explore and connect with this story. Even though my life is so different from the lives of these characters, both geographically and culturally, I still felt perfectly comfortable "taking a walk in their shoes" and being engaged in this novel.
My apologies if the text is difficult to read. I made this image with Adobe Express, and it might have gotten compressed a little in Scratch. Sabaa Tahir is also the author of a fantasy series called An Ember in the Ashes. I eventually stopped reading it, but the first three books were very good.
