Hijabi Butch Blues is a memoir about a queer Muslim hijabi, Lamya, in a coming-of-age story that is told alongside stories from the Quran.

Hijabi Butch Blues follows Lamya's life as they navigate an Islamphobic, racist, transphobic, and homophobic world while finding out how to love themselves and others around them. The novel follows Lamya's life from her childhood in South Asia to moving to America for college and Lamya's own navigation of these differences. Throughout their life, Lamya uses the Quran to relate to their life and find answers for different challenges they face.

As someone who is a fan of memoirs, I found this to be very unique and interesting. Being told alongside the Quran was such an effective way to show how heavily religion influences Lamya's life and how everyone can interpret religious texts in their own way. The personal perspective of being Muslim, darker skinned, and queer in America was an insight on the injustices many people face but in a way that came to acceptance and finding one's place and people among these injustices. My one critique would be the timeline of this novel in that it was not chronological-- while I found it interesting, it was hard to follow and often left you unsatisfied because many problems were not resolved but rather mentioned at another time off-handedly.

Thank you, Random House Publishing Group - Random House, The Dial Press, for allowing me to read Hijab Butch Blues early!

My eyes got teary reading this memoir. I don't read biographies usually, but this one had something special that caught my eye and I was right. I loved it.

As someone who was raised with a Christian background, despite ending up wiccan, I am amazed, probably rather naively, how many of the tsories of the Koran are also stories in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testiment. These are stories most people of Christian background would recognize, such as Joseph and his coat of many colors, and Noah and his arc. Except, they have different names in the Koran, and so at first, when Lamya brings them up to explain something that is happening in her life, I dont’ recognize who she is talking about, until the story unfolds, and then I say, oh, she is talking about Jonah and the Whale, only here he is known as Yunus.

And so the author uses prophets from the Koran to explain how things are with her life. The reason she brings Yunus up is because she at first things he has run away, to be thrown into the sea and swallowed by a whale. But her friends explain that no, he just left to get a break. He didn’t run away. ANd then she explains that is what Lamya has done with her life. Sometimes you just have to retreat.
This is an amazing memoir, looking back on how she came out, how she gained friends, how she learned to live in America. And interwoven with stories from the Koran to relate how life is similar and different.

And because the three religions spring from the same roots, we get stories that are the same, but different. We still get Moses freeing the Jews, but it is told with a different name, Musa, and the story is slightly different, but the red sea still parts.

Very accessible story. Very engaging memoir. Thoroughly kept me engaged.

<em>Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.</em>

In this beautifully written memoir, you will find a meticulously woven tapestry of warm childhood memories, personal growth and coming of age intertwined with a relatable read of stories in the Quran. The author's voice is clear and gives a portrait of a complex, self-conscious, strong and compassionate person. Near the end of the book is a valuable analogy of the whale that sheltered the prophet Yonus and about picking one's fights as holding space to protect oneself:

"A whale that allows me to keep fighting, to fight with my writing. A whale that allows me to save my energy for curious, kind dialogue and to support those I love -- instead of fighting to fend off racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, Islamophobes who could look up where I live, where I work, who and what I hold dear."

She describes a journey to hold onto her family of origin by holding onto her religious values and creating her own chosen tribe and family who reflect back her integrity as a queer person. I wasn't able to put this book down once I picked it up -- and look forward to more from Lamya H.

I adored this book. It's an immigrant story, a woman's personal tale of discovery, a queer biography, a woman's religious experience story, so many interesting things and I wanted to know this person from the book's description alone. I don't know much about the Muslim religion. I grew up in a country where my other closest religion was Hinduism. While I knew some stories from Muslim tradition since Islam was the popular third religion in my country I had no Muslim relatives like I did Hindu relatives and there were no television shows about the Muslim religion while I watched The Ramayana and The Mahabharat on television. Lamya is a young woman growing up in a strict Muslim country where her mother is not allowed to drive, and the lives of women are severely restrictive, she is inquisitive, a bit of a tomboy, class clown and discovering that she's attracted to women. This will not work for her within her society and when she gets an opportunity to come to the United States as a student her being Muslim, living a life where she takes her religion seriously and embraces it as part of her identity, the conflicts that arise because she's a lesbian and finding spaces where she can be feminist, Muslim, a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, her status as an immigrant there is so much intersectionality here. I had never read a book like this one and am happy that I did because there is so much richness in learning about other people's experiences and it really made me want to read the Quran because there's so much beauty in the way the stories from the Quran are written about I just might give it a read.