A Very Large Expanse of Sea

Look. I like Tahereh Mafi, I think she is an incredibly intelligent, well-spoken, and well-dressed woman. And I appreciate what she was trying to do with this book, and the point of view she provides here is valuable. But I don't think she's a very good writer.

Shirin is a Muslim teenager living in a recently post-9/11 world. How recently is a bit unclear, for however Mafi likes to let us know that it is indeed the 00s, there's never any referential sense of time passed from that event. Along with frequent moves around the country because of her father's high-powered career track, Shirin deals with daily microaggressions from her peers that suddenly turn into straight-up aggression when she begins dating a popular white boy named Ocean James. Also, she joins a break dancing group with her brother. There's a handsome Muslim boy in the mix too for some reason. Its very difficult to draw Mafi's books into a standard conflict-driven arcs, and A Very Large Expanse of Sea is no exception.

I enjoyed anything that involved Shirin's family, details like her brother's feelings on Ramadan and the culture around food. I like that she tells the experience of a young Muslim woman honestly, with humor, anger and affection. I think this story is a great example of how people who have privilege are blind to it, with how Shirin consistently warns Ocean that the two of them dating openly would lead to a lot of prejudice, but he doesn't take her seriously until it actually happens. This book has decent content, which is why its getting two stars rather than one, but its not an artfully crafted story by any means. The prose style reads like the personal essay of a teenager, and a lot of the story is told in summary, with very little narrative build-up or release.

A Very Large Expanse of Sea has a lot of the same problems that other books by Mafi have. Very few to no female characters to support the central one, a whole lot of telling to make up for the lack of organic character and relationship building, and little regard for stuff that a reader might actually find exciting. Those break dancing competitions? Most pass in a hand wave. The town, which is such a massive influence on the events in the story, has zero personality. I mean, yeah, she tells us the people there are racist and obsessed with basketball, but none of that is actually shown. We're only told when it becomes important.

Ocean has no characterization - he's a person with pretty eyes that has the hots for Shirin. Shirin is so oblivious to the world around her, she doesn't even realize he's a star basketball player and popular, its a marvel she noticed that he had attributes she found attractive at all. Whatever those might be. To be fair, their relationship reads like how a lot of teenage relationships actually function - two lost horny souls that awkwardly magnetized to each other for no apparent reason. Which is fine I guess if you're a teenager and its actually your life. But does anyone want to read that? Just sitting in a room with two teenagers saying “Oh” and “Ok” back and forth? It got creepy after a while.

It concerns me that despite all of Mafi's apparent strength and intelligence as a person, she keeps writing narratives about girls who are never friends with other girls, who fall in love with boys who exhibit pushy and violent behavior, and who never seem to really exist in their own worlds. That no matter how impressive she makes her protagonists, the only character that ends up mattering is the boy. It also amazes me that her books keep getting published when they have very little narrative structure. I have read romantic contemporary YA before, and I actually really enjoyed it. Just because you're writing contemporary doesn't mean you translate the insipid conversations of teenagers verbatim. I don't think even teenagers want to see themselves that way. And it doesn't mean you can write about teenagers whispering into their phones at each other and call it a plot. If I'm picking up a book, I want to see an actual, you know, story.