American Taliban Review

For whatever reason, I have been having a tough time getting into books this year, so I have read very little.  I was browsing the library website and found American Taliban by Pearl Abraham.

It starts out with 18 year old John Jude surfing for the 2000 summer.  He decides to defer his year at Brown to find himself.  He then hurts himself skateboarding and can no longer do much physical activity.  So he starts working on his reading list.  As he is reading about religion he decides he needs to study classic Arabic.  He goes to a school in Brooklyn to study Arabic.  While there he becomes close to another boy his age that tells him he should go to Pakistan to be surrounded by the language and culture.  In this culture his believes become more aligned with the radical Muslim way of thought.

Overall, this book seemed a little disjointed to me.  It starts out discussing surfing and skate boarding in great deal and other times it discusses the Arab language, and later the Muslim culture.  I felt that the idea behind the store was great, very relevant to current events.  But it felt like some ideas were forced, like when John converted to Islam.  I understand why it was necessary in the story, but it did not feel like there was much thought to it.  I also found it strange that John never questioned his American upbring against what he was learning in Pakistan.  It just seemed that a lot of thought and questioning was left out.

Overall, the book was a disappointment to me.  I felt like this could have been a great book bring up a lot of thought provoking questions, I did not see any of that.  In the end, I pushed to finish the book hoping it would get better, but I finally got to a point where I only had 100 pages to go so I was reading more to finish and move on to another book, rather than the enjoyment of what was going to happen in the end.