Book Recommendations for Teenage Muslim Girls
by The Girls of Crescent in Culture & Lifestyle on 18th October, 2019
Two Teenagers Start a Non-Profit Organisation girlsofthecrescent.org. to Increase Books With Female Muslim Characters in Libraries, we’ve highlighted their work before but this time we asked the girls which books they would recommend for girls their age and they cam back with 6 books which all feature Muslim women or girls within them! Mena and Zena Nasiri, aged 14 and 16 respectively.
Ayesha Dean and the Istanbul Intrigue and Ayesha Dean and the Seville Secret, by Melati Lum. These two books feature a young Muslim girl who goes on adventures with her best friends and solves mysteries. These books are great for middle grade readers who like a fun mystery with lovable characters!
The Perfect Gift by J. Samia Mair is an adorable picture book about a young girl looking for an Eid present for her family and finds a present that can be cherished forever. We read this book during a storytime in a library near us and the children loved it!
A great young adult novel is A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, which is about the lives of two Afghani women brought together in unfortunate circumstances. We couldn’t put down this heart-wrenching book and would recommended it to anyone who would like a deeply emotional read.
Ms. Marvel, by G. WIllow Wilson and Sana Amanat, is a wonderful comic book series about a Pakistani-American teenage Muslim girl who gets superpowers and has to learn how to be a superhero. It is a funny and relatable series for teen readers!
The Gift of Ramadan, by Rabiah York Lumbard, is an adorable picture book about a young girl who decides to fast for the first time during Ramadan but struggles with it and learns that the month is about more than fasting. It is a heartwarming book with beautiful illustrations that is perfect to read to any child!
Internment, by Samira Ahmed, is about a teenage girl and her family who are forced into an internment camp for Muslim Americans and fights for her rights and for freedom. This is a compelling story with a brave protagonist and is good for teen readers.
The Girls of Crescent
Our goal is to increase diversity and representation and to bring awareness to the lack of diversity in libraries and schools. Girls of the Crescent is formed to collect books with female Muslim main characters and donate them to school districts and libraries.
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