The Friday 56: A Girl Like That

The Friday 56 is a weekly blog meme hosted by Freda’s Voice. The idea is to share an excerpt from a book you’ve been reading every Friday, to promote the book or simply just to showcase your current read!

Rules:
*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader
(If you have to improvise, that’s OK.)
*Find any sentence, (or few, just don’t spoil it)
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post below in Linky. Add the post url, not your blog url.
*It’s that simple

‘The days his friends did not come over, he took to tripping me in the corridors of our house, laughing at my confusion, sneering at the way I cried out in pain. “My friends are right,” he had said. “Girls are silly crybabies.”
Though mother made him apologise for his behaviour later, I knew that this was only the beginning- the first crack in a relationship that I had once thought unbreakable, a shade of grey in a photograph that, until then, had always appeared black and white.’

Sixteen-year-old Zarin Wadia is many things: a bright and vivacious student, an orphan, a risk taker. She’s also the kind of girl that parents warn their kids to stay away from: a troublemaker whose many romances are the subject of endless gossip at school.  You don’t want to get involved with a girl like that, they say. So how is it that eighteen-year-old Porus Dumasia has only ever had eyes for her? 

I’ve not included the full synopsis here, because this is a book I’d recommend going into without reading the premise. I did just that, and the huge twist in the first half was even more captivating and tense as a result. This is an own voices novel about gender roles, equality, and cultural norms in India and Saudi Arabia. I finished it in three days because it was such a gripping read, and I’d highly recommend it. (TWs for attempted rape, sexual assault/abuse, bullying, drugs, violence.)

What are you reading this week? Have you got any recommendations for other own voices books?