DNF - I wasn't able to connect with the writing style, it felt somewhat trite & somewhat dry. I think this is probably the case of not being the target reader for this one.

The blurb for American Fever grabbed my attention as it was set in rural Oregon and was about an exchange student, both things that I have a personal connection with. And I could definitely find a lot to relate to in the coming of age journey/cross-cultural journey taken by our main character Hira who arrives in rural Oregon from Pakistan to spend a year with single mother Kelly and her daughter Amy.

There is a lot of universality to the experiences described in this story. Thinking that things will always be better somewhere else but then longing for and missing the familiar. The experience of the exchange student definitely rang true for me, having expectations of the experience that didn’t quite live up to the expectation and realizing that home, even with its challenges, was not as bad as it seemed.

I also really appreciated a section in this story that provided detailed information about TB as a disease as something that impacted our main character and many people globally.

I also struggled with Hira as a character. She was still young and often pointed out that her parents and those around her were not doing a good job of taking care of her. But at the same time, I think I expected her to have more agency in her own experience as someone that was old enough to go on an exchange and at times it felt like she was really playing the victim which I was a bit put off by. In some sense she was a victim, but I just didn’t personally like the focus that was given to this.

Overall I think this book’s exploration of cultural differences was interesting and the experience of a young woman navigating her journey between two worlds and the impact of this on her was well done. If this is something that is of interest to you it is very much worth the read!

Thank you Skyhorse Publishing and Netgalley for providing me a copy of this book. 3.5 stars.

When I finished reading the novel, I was filled with gratitude for finding this brilliant voice from our country at the start of her career. I am looking forward to following her writing journey in the coming years. I am also teaching her fiction in my courses this year. Dur e Aziz Amna is a writer that every Pakistani should be reading. American Fever combines the classical elements of coming-of-age stories with a layered and clever discourse on identity and selfhood. The prose is constructed in that steely and fast-paced manner that one would think that Amna has been writing novels all her life. This is one of the rare debuts where one feels, as Saul Bellow said about Roth, that the writer is no beginner but already a virtuoso.

This new voice was amazing to read. It was a storyline that seems similar to others we've heard but it stands out because of the authors writing. There are so many positive things to say about this book!

I think I'm in love with AAPI authors and this one isn't an exception. Hira is a wonderful character and a cool teen and I loved the story. It had interesting insights in the life of immigrants!

3.5 stars.
When sixteen-year-old Pakistani student Hira is granted a place in a US State Department-sponsored exchange program for Muslim youths from Asia to study in America, she sees this as an opportunity to escape, for a little while, some of the attitudes and restrictions she regularly encounters in Pakistan. Unfortunately, to her mind, she's placed in a home in small town Oregon. Not only that, to her parents' concern, her host parent is a single mother with a teen and a dog, and while Kelly is friendly, she does not reassure Hira's parents that Hira will be able to live as a Muslim in this home.

Hira is welcomed into Kelly's home and develops relationships with her and her daughter Amy. And though things seem to be going reasonably well from Kelly's perspective, Hira keeps herself at a little distance from the pair, maintaining a certain arrogance and superiority over them and their lives. It's ironic, as Hira had wanted an escape from expectations of home, but then looks down on the differences she encounters. Then Hira is diagnosed with TB, which definitely strains her relationships in the town.

Hira is a little frustrating, even while she's funny and observant. Her push-pull relationship with the people and things she encounters in small town American life make for interesting reading. She experiences some bigotry, but also finds some friends.

Hira has to confront a lot of things during her time in the US. Though she likes and enjoys parts of US culture, and that of her own, she is at the same time frustrated by the expectations and restrictions from her family, her culture and her host culture. And some of the very things Hira was trying to escape from in her own culture are ironically the very things she ends up missing. This behaviour feels very familiar, having seen it in mine and many of my friends' parents.

This often manifests in Hira as angry, resentful or spiteful words, but it’s also a part of her being an adolescent, when one's behaviour can be frustratingly contradictory.

Over the many months she lives with Kelly and Amy, Hira ends up growing up a lot, but she's still a teen, and some of her observations can be fairly dramatic and self-centred.

A few parts of the book dragged a little, but this was still an enjoyable read.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Skyhorse Publishing for this book in exchange for my review.

I have mixed feelings about this book, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. For one, it started out really slow, and maybe it’s just me but the time jumps weren’t clear at first.

For two, while I thought Hira was smart and funny — and yes, a “witty” narrator — I can’t definitively say how she feels about America vs. Pakistan. Was that the point? Maybe, because even though she compared them all the time, she never said which was her preference. I think I was expecting her clearly pick a side.

For three, there are a couple of storylines that I wish had been explored in a bit more depth. But, I did like the ending, except for not knowing what’s next for Hira, particularly academically. (There are some mentions of her adult life, but not a complete chronicle from the end of the novel.)

I think this might make an interesting movie. I’d like to actually see some of the the comparisons and the dynamics in action. I’d recommend this book if you like books by/featuring a Muslim woman from Pakistan.

3.5 stars. This is a strong debut from a talented novelist with a keen eye for social nuances and cross-cultural tensions. Hira, a 17-year-old from a privileged Pakistani family, spends a year as an exchange student in a rural Oregon high school, as part of a post-9/11 State Department-funded program to bring young adults from the Muslim world to the States as cultural ambassadors.

As a South Asian Muslim parachuting into an all-white working-class town of conservative churchgoers, she experiences subtle micro-aggressions and utter incomprehension. Homesick and disconnected from her peers, Hira approaches her new surroundings with caustic and self-lacerating wit, and her own orneriness and prickliness makes her a perceptive first-person narrator full of teenaged self-dramatization and under-confidence. She dodges all of the obvious clichéd East/West binaries as she (for example) compares her host mother Kelly's genial absence to her own mother's hovering over-involvement.

What forces Hira to grow up, and further isolates her from her host family and the whole town, is a diagnosis of tuberculosis, and her forced months of quarantine (this isn't a spoiler-- it's revealed on the first page). Sometimes the narrative energy flags, and some of Hira's first-person asides and ethnographic observations might have worked better in essay rather than fictional form.

Thanks to Arcade Books and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC of this in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

I wanted to like this story more but the main character got too annoying for me which kind of ruined the plot.

We follow 16 year old Hira, a Pakistani student who is on a year long exchange program in Oregon. As she assimilate herself to new and drastic changes, she finds herself stuck between her cultural identity and wanting to fit in. Hira finds that it is not all she imagined it to be and found herself missing home, especially her family. In her time there, she starts to feel unwell but kept brushing it off until she coughs up blood. She was diagnosed with tuberculosis which pushed her into quarantine making her feel lonelier than ever.

Like any teenager, Hira is eager to leave her family behind and dreams of living the life in America. She thought that her life would go through miraculous changes but it was far from what she imagined. I sympathise with Hira at first but she soon became frustrating. I could feel her loneliness and alienation, her longing to fit in and her longing for home. All these are relatable but I feel that she is also selfish and self-centred in her remarks. She doesn’t want to be judged but she does the same towards others which is a big turn off for me.

What I did enjoy is her reflections on her identity, culture and her unwillingness to compromise who she is just so she can fit in. She stood her ground for what she believed in. Not many people can do that and I do admire her integrity. This does make for a compelling coming-of-age story that sheds light on American prejudices towards outsiders and the bias assumptions people have on Muslims, especially those from Middle East.

Thank you Netgalley and Sky Horse Publishing for the arc.

Hira, a Pakistani teen, spends a year abroad in America. It sounds simple, and it's the perfect setup for the fish-out-of-water or teen-straddling-two-cultures story. However, it's much more than that. Told as if it's a memoir, Hira starts out unhappy that she's sent to rural Oregon rather than to a city and that her host family--a single working mother and her daughter--knows nothing about Pakistan or Muslims. She’s also confused that there is no one to wait on her like back home. She’s expected to contribute to preparing meals, clean her own room, and wash her own laundry.

Prior to arriving in America, Hira is told of the many negative aspects of the country and its citizens, and she manages to find most everything distasteful. Interestingly, the older Hira does mention now and then that she would learn later that she and those at home had been wrong about many of the myths believed and tales told about the evils of the United States. It takes an Omani exchange student, Hira’s only real friend at school, to point out that he doesn’t know why she’s so angry all the time. She’s not being treated badly. She can fend for herself. People do want to know about her, her religion, her country, her family. It is when she returns home that she begins to understand that she was valued member of the family that wanted her for ten months.
A different kind of coming-of-age story, American Fever shows both cultures’ values and contributions to the world while not hiding the parts that need work from both viewpoints.

A gorgeously written book about Hira, a 16-year old girl from Pakistan who is selected to go to the United States as an exchange student. She's set up with a family in rural Oregon, with all the ambivalence of fitting into a new situation where one may or may not be unwanted. A wonderful debut novel.

3 ½ stars (rounded up)

“[W]e talked incessantly about the gap between here and there. With each articulated difference, we flattened ourselves and let American define us. We were only ever what it was not.”


My initial reaction upon finishing American Fever was something in the realm of ‘underwhelmed’. Yet, as weeks passed by my opinion changed. Maybe it’s because my mother read this after I did and we ended up talking about certain scenes and characters in a way that made it all the more vivid in my mind. Or maybe I just needed time to reconcile myself with the tone and direction of the story. Suffice it to say that the review I am now writing will be a lot more positive than the one I’d planned to write. While I am sure that some readers will be able to tell that this is a first novel, I believe that American Fever makes for a very promising and confident debut. Not only does it resist the usual coming-of-age character arch, but the narrative retains a certain ambivalence that really adds depth and nuance to the story.

“The newness of America beckoned. Kelly and Amy appeared crisp, like newly tailored clothes, the fact of them being strangers suddenly inviting. Abbu’s tyranny, Ammi’s coldness, Faisal’s petty concerns— I would leave them all behind. Because I was sixteen, and I thought one did that, could do that— leave anything behind.”


The novel revolves around Hira, a 16-year-old Pakistani girl who in 2010 goes on a year-long exchange program, only to find herself in a small-town in Oregon. At first, Hira, a rather prickly and stubborn teen, is eager to leave her family behind and to refashion herself in America, the land of (supposed) opportunities. Hira buys into that tantalizing possibility of change offered by a new environment, but her ‘new’ life in rural Oregon is far from what she’d envisioned. First of all, there is the family she is staying with, Kelly and Amy, a single mother and her teen daughter. Kelly’s parenting is far from what Hira is accustomed to and she comes to resent what she perceives as a lack of care from Kelly. Because there seem to be no fixed mealtimes, and being used to food being prepared for her, Hira begins to lose weight. Additionally, Hira struggles to find places where she can buy halal meat. As Hira attempts to navigate Kelly’s ‘benign’ ignorance and Amy’s seeming disinterest, she also tries to familiarize herself with everyday American life. From their bathroom setups (after years in the uk i have returned to italy and boy did i miss bidets), to the way they interact with one another and so forth. At school, she is not necessarily ostracized but she mostly interacts with the only two other foreign students, Nicole, who is French, and Hamid, who is Omani. Hira and Hamid bond over their similar experiences with racism and islamophobia, although Hira soon finds out that they have quite different perspectives and attitudes when it comes to their peers and the notion of ‘fitting’ into American culture.

Hira is a character that is as sympathetic as she is aggravating. You feel for her sense of alienation, her longing for a different experience, and later on her homesickness. But she is also rather self-centered and entitled (at one point rebuking kelly for not cooking more). She is also an observer, someone who often seems at a remove from her surroundings, taking them in but not necessarily allowing herself to interact with them. Although her reflections on belonging, identity, and the notion of ‘assimilation’ are rendered with piercing clarity, a sense of ambivalence and unease permeates much of her narration. Concomitant to her initial desire to connect to others and America itself, is her unwillingness to ‘flatten’ herself or her culture to ‘fit’ in. Her self-divide is somewhat assuaged when she begins to fall for Ali, but, as the weeks go by Hira begins to feel increasingly unwell and, after she begins coughing up blood, is diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Dur e Aziz Amna’s American Fever will definitely appeal to fans of ambivalent narrators and stories following characters who leave one country for another, attempting perhaps to sever themselves from their past selves, like Charlotte Brontë and Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Lucys’. Hira’s introspective quiet yet unyielding nature very much brought to mind Brontë and Jamaica's novels, respectively Villette and Lucy. Stylistically and thematically American Fever shares quite a lot with those two novels. From the cool-tone of the prose, to Hira’s occasional wryness and the awkward, occasionally tense, dialogues.

Hira’s journey resists conforming to the usual coming-of-age arc. Her lack of growth brought to mind Selin from Batuman's The Idiot. While it is questionable whether Hira has gained any maturity or a new outlook by the end of her narrative, she has not necessarily stayed the same Hira she was before going to Oregon. As much as she is misunderstood by others, she also makes assumptions about others, and all too often misreads other people. Yet Hira remains a deeply compelling narrator whose voice, frustrating as it may be, nevertheless held my attention. If you are liked releases such as Win Me Something & You Exist Too Much, and Days of Distraction you should consider adding this debut to your tbr.

American Fever presents its readers with a piercing interrogation of otherness and belonging that doubles as a quiet yet poignant meditation on adolescence, identity, and family. The narrative has a quiet almost slice-of-life feel that may bore readers who are looking for more plot-driven storytelling. But, if you are looking for a nuanced character study, look no further.

I truly love this cover! The book is pretty good too. I like reading about fish out of water situations and an exchange student in Oregon really caught my interest. I loved her thoughts on American and Pakistan and setting it in the PNW, one of the most racist places I've ever been really was a good choice. I can't wait to see what she writes next.

Beautifully written! Coming to America, coming of age stories that will touch the heart. Loved it. Thanks again!

Oh my gosh, the writing style was everything, and deserved 5 stars purely for that, and the rest of the book was just as superb, it was incredibly moving, examined cultural differences, modern life in a different place and in my opinion, this will be a future classic.

In American Fever we follow Hira, a teenager from Pakistan who embarks on a year abroad with a host family in a small American town. For a large part of her trip she is forced to quarantine with tuberculosis and we see the timeline of events leading up to Hira’s trip abroad, the culture shock of the first few months adjusting to her new surroundings and the actual quarantine period.

I really enjoyed the character of Hira - she was acerbic, abrasive and often annoying (as teenagers usually are) but I also found her really easy to warm to and connect with. I particularly liked the way the story is told from Hira’s point of view as she reflects back on this year, very self-aware with the distance of a few years passing since her trip.

The book is also a biting commentary on US exceptionalism and the idea that other cultures are simply referent.

Thank you to the publisher for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

I appreciated the exchange student/feeling "other" in America element and the storyline was compelling enough to keep me reading, but none of these characters was even a little bit likeable. Reading about Hira suffering and exposing hundreds of people to TB because not a single adult thought that a terrible cough lasting for months was reason enough to see a doctor was hard to read, especially in the midst of a pandemic that most people want to pretend is over. Thanks to NetGalley and Skyhorse publishing for early access to this book in exchange for my honest review.

Hira is in an exchange program and as I'm just starting this book.. Her experience is going as well as you can imagine for 2011. I'm hoping for some good experiences but as great as this country can be it can do a lot better with welcoming people from other countries and religions. Being fearful of a religion that billions of people practice cause a radical group of them are horrible is insane. It's like being scared of Christianity cause of the KKK.

I feel so bad that she has to cook and clean for herself cause her house mom is a single mom. I mean rude you signed up for the job.

It's true though we have so many chores, I wish having household help was an affordable thing, like daily cook and clean etc.

This book is definitely already outlining the huge differences in the cultures represented. And I'm getting second hand embarrassment for how she is being treated cause she deserves better than that. Like a house family that can use Google and be prepared for her arrival.

Thank you skyhorsepublishing and netgalley for the e-ARC for my honest and voluntary review.

Enlightening and beautiful in scope and purpose, this book begs to be read. It is dense in places but the pacing, writing, and narration (the MC is as honest and refreshing as any I’ve read in a long time) make up for it.

Thank you for this opportunity!

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC for this book.

4.5 stars

When I first started this book I didn't have high hopes, the female main character felt a bit pretentious and her views about Islam and womanhood in Pakistan were kind of Islamophobic and sexist. However, I couldn't be more wrong. Yes, at times her thoughts about womanhood, Islam, and the Middle East didn't agree with me but that just showed the complexity of her character. As a middle eastern Muslim woman myself, I know that none of us is perfect and we all struggle with balancing a world between the West and the East.

Our main character is a Pakistani girl who goes to the US for an exchange year at the start of the 2010s. The story follows her struggles of being a brown Muslim woman in the US when violence in the East is rampant and Obama is in lead.

There were so many books throughout this book where I felt so seen by her, whether it was about her faith, boys, class, or culture. For example, at one point she talks about the differences between being an upper class in a third world country vs middle class in a developed country and that is something that I frequently think about but never was able to put into words.

Another big point of the book was how she tried to escape a closed-off, conservative culture but still kept up with her own ways and refused to change in the US. While the US offered her large freedoms, she still refused to assimilate or integrate with the people at certain points. She loved that she could walk home at night or hold hands with Ali in public but missed people that looked like her, missed people speaking Urdu, and missed her own community.

It showed the advantages and disadvantages of living in a developed country. While she was free in so many ways, the people were xenophobic, islamophobic, racist, or just didn't understand her struggles and couldn't relate to her. While she encountered these problems, even though she herself was struggling with staying true to her beliefs, she never let another person be racist or xenophobic towards her and defended herself.

I think the book touched on a lot of problems foreigners face in other countries and the author put these problems and people's feelings in these situations into words perfectly. I truly believe this book has the potential to become a classic in the future.