American Fever

"I read this only very recently. I thought it was funny and heartwarming. It was something that, somehow, I related to. I’d heard mixed reviews, but it really exceeded my expectations. It is about a girl who goes from Pakistan to the US for a year and stays with a host family in America. She finds out that she has tuberculosis. It’s her journey of escaping, again, the confines of culture, and going there and standing up for her own values. She finds out things that are similar and things that are different, and it’s about her experience in a small town. I was in the US last year for a three-month residency, so I could also relate to some things there. I’ve traveled to the US before, but I’d never stayed for that long a stretch. There were some things that I really found funny, the way she’d written about them. It’s a story about breaking the shackles and going on an adventure. She comes back home a little bit earlier than was decided initially. I think it’s really well written, and a very fun book."