Love, Hate & Other Filters

Maya Aziz dreams about kissing boys and going to film school in New York, but miles away, an unknown danger looms. A terrorist attack in another city unleashes fear and hate in Maya’s small town, changing her life and disrupting her future.

A stunning debut novel that celebrates the power of personal choice in a world that wants to put labels on us all.

Love Hate & Other Filters by Samira Ahmed is a charming read that packs a serious emotional punch. It reads like a Carly Rae Jepson song, all inexperience and desires, as yet unfulfilled. Maya is full of typical teenage girl fantasies – consumed by the idea of being loved and being in love (those are, at least in my opinion, different from each other), of independence from her parents and, her biggest and most secret fantasy of them all: moving to New York to pursue film making.

I love to read about teenagers with ambition, and Maya has that in spades. She wants to be a film maker, and there are few chapters where she doesn’t have her trusty camera with her, so she can, as she puts it, look back on herself when she’s an old lady and remember what it was like to be her now. Unfortunately for Maya, her desire to make film-making her career is one of the many areas where she clashes with her strict parents. Maya is Muslim American and a child of immigrants – her parents moved to America from India and have pretty traditional values and a strong idea of the path they want Maya to take, and it involves studying close to home, studying something that will ultimately lead to a job (this may just be because I am getting old or cynical or both, but I felt like I understood where her parents were coming from on this – who would want their kid to doom themselves the life of frustration and disappointment that is pursuing a creative career?!) and marrying a nice Muslim boy.

I really enjoyed how Ahmed approached Maya’s relationship with her parents. Though they were very strict, and, at times, SO frustrating, they were always sympathetic characters. It wasn’t that they wanted to hurt Maya with their actions any more than Maya wanted to hurt them with her own, it was more that there was a fundamental misunderstanding between them of their roles in each other’s lives – one that they spend much of the novel trying to navigate to various degrees of success.

And then, the bombing. Ahmed’s writing of the terrorist attack that kills dozens in the town over from Maya’s was painfully realistic. There was a real sense of that sad, suspended state of disbelief – this happened again? – you live in on the outside while the attack unfolds, and subsequently names and pictures of victims fill the news and us with all this loss from one senseless act of terror. Maya’s fear and sorrow over the attack is compounded by fear of the consequences if the bomber was Muslim – which the police suspect is the case. Suddenly her status as the only Muslim girl in her overwhelmingly white high school feels like a greater weight than usual – and that’s before the so called ‘revenge’ attacks on her and her family even start.

In Love, Hate & Other Filters, Islamaphobia is kind of like the monster under the bed. There are times when you can ignore it and go on with your life, but at the slightest change it won’t hesitate to pull you under with its claws and rip you to shreds – usually with an audience studiously looking the other way as it happens. The things Maya is subjected to after the terrorist attack are frightening and sickening – the sort of assumed safety we walk around with for much of our lives is totally taken away from her and her family as they become the objects of hate and revenge for crimes that have nothing to do with them.

I think what makes Love, Hate & Other Filters quite such a revolutionary book is that it’s a story about hate that actually isn’t about hate at all. It’s about a young woman fighting hatred, finding her way and claiming her space in a world she has just as much right to as anyone else

In this fantastic debut (!) novel, Samira Ahmed will put you through the emotional ringer – from the maddening, insulting and deeply sad state of current Western society to the heart-racing, anxiety inducing possibilities of first love and the future, it’s a novel into which you can’t help but throw your entire heart.