Race To The Finish Line - Aisha Yusuf
Race To The Finish Line is all in all a good read with some important themes such as small town racism, exclusion, Islamophobia, and human trafficking. The book seems to be marketed towards a YA public, but I think middle schoolers will definitely appreciate it too, and the overall tone would also work for a younger and older audience. I know I would have appreciated this novel as a kid and a young adult!
Aaleyah is about to enter her senior year in high school in Canada when her parents announce that they will be moving to a small town in Arkansas, USA for a year, because of her father’s job. Aaleyah’s main concern about moving lies in the fact that she is both Black and Muslim, and is worried about how she will be treated in the US. Her fears are very much confirmed when they arrive, as not only are there barely any Black families in the town, there are barely any families of color there at all. She is stared down, insulted, ignored, and called a terrorist during her first day at school, and it only starts to get a bit better for her once she makes friends with a couple of other seniors in the journalism club. But things are about to get a lot worse when the three friends uncover some deeply disturbing town secrets…
This book is like a modern day Nancy Drew meets (not so gratuitously violent) Jack Reacher but with real, well-rounded characters. Aaleyah is a regular teen who loves her friends, coffee, driving around, food, singing full force along to her favorite songs, boxing, and asking questions about everything. She is also a practicing Muslim and wears a hijab, like millions of other Muslim teens in North America, but it isn’t the main part of her identity. What I really, really appreciated about Aaleyah as a character is that she is a completely normal teen but she is also a teen that is rarely represented in books, movies or TV shows. More of this please!
Some of the pacing in the novel felt a little rushed, and I would have loved to have dived a little more into the human trafficking part of the novel, as well as some of the other characters who felt a little underdeveloped, and there were a few loose ends here and there (where did the English teacher fit into the network of villains?), but all in all it was a good read, with some great themes, a really strong and loveable main character, and a good mystery that made it kind of unputdownable!
I can’t wait to see what else Aisha Yusuf has up her sleeve!
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.