Circassians! The father of Allie, title character and first-person narrator of Courtney’s novel, comes from a Circassian family. They’re an ethnic group originally from the Northern Caucasus. After their encounter with an expanding Russian Empire went the way of most encounters between small peoples and the empire, the vast majority of Circassians were expelled to the Ottoman Empire. Most contemporary Circassians live in Turkey, with a smaller population in Russia, and still smaller but historically significant groups in Jordan and Syria. Allie’s extended family hails from Jordan, where various older relatives were prominent enough to have known the royal family personally.

More importantly for Allie, her father is an American academic. As a result, her immediate family (she’s an only child) has been peripatetic as she has grown up while her father moved from one academic appointment to another. Her mother’s work as a therapist has been flexible enough that the family could follow the professorial lottery. Which, with a tenure-track job at Emory University, Allie’s dad appears finally to have won. Allie has reacted to her family’s journey by becoming adaptable, with a knack for fitting in nearly everywhere and a genuine interest in the people she gets to know at each new stop. The down side, understandably, is that she sometimes wonders who she really is beneath all of the personas she has tried on.

Allie’s mom grew up a white Christian in Florida and converted to marry Allie’s dad, Mo (short for Muhammad). Crucially for the story, the protagonist presents as white: Circassians are literally Caucasian, and genetics made Allie a redhead. She’s not obviously from a Muslim background, and her father became increasingly secular over his adult life.

All-American Muslim Girl begins with Allie halfway through her first year in high school in the fictional north Atlanta suburb of Providence. In the first chapter, Allie and her parents fly to Dallas, where their extended family — “still jet-lagged from Saudi, Jordan, London, and New Jersey. Everybody is a cousin, or a friend of a cousin, or the cousin of a friend—and they all go back decades, most to the old days in Jordan” (p. 13) — is gathering to celebrate New Year’s at the house of one of her aunts. Parts of the reunion read to me like the large, Southern family events I went to as a kid. People everywhere going in and out; music; generations; teasing, sometimes gentle, sometimes more barbed; relations of semi-understood provenance (Aunt So-and-So who’s actually a second cousin); and lots of food. Of course for Allie’s family, the conversations are going in three different languages: English, Arabic, and Circassian. The decor is different, with a lot of vivid colors and Koran verses, though naturally the two aunts’ houses that Allie visits in Dallas could hardly be more different from one another.

Continue reading