Parvin, protagonist of Olivia Abtahi's Perfectly Parvin, has concerns about high school. But she's confident she's starting off the year with a boyfriend and a date to the very important homecoming dance...
...Until he breaks up with her very publicly at orientation, telling her that she's too loud and too much.
After a movie night with her two besties, Ruth and Fabian, Parvin comes to a very unfortunate conclusion. The heroines of the flicks, the girls who catch the male gaze, are the opposite of too loud and too much. They've quiet and demure and wait for the guy to make the first move rather than take any kind of initiative. That's the kind of girl she has to morph into...
...and she doesn't have a lot of time. She's run into Wesley and his new girlfriend and told them she has a date to Homecoming. So to avoid a second humiliation she has to come up with a date worthy boy.
But that's not all that's going on in Parvin's life. Her father is from Iran. His half sister is planning to visit her family. But she's detained and deported. It's 2017. Guess who's in the White House. Writing about the Muslim Ban in her author's note, Abtahi says, "But we will never forget the families that were torn apart, the students who couldn't attend the universities that accepted them, and the hate and vitriol the United States was sanctioned to spew."
With a second T***p presidency on the horizon Perfectly Parvin is a very timely read.
On a purrrsonal note, it wasn't too bad out this morning. To get fresh air and exercise I made a Hannaford/Goodwill run. At Hannaford I bought the ingredients to make Eugene's favorite kind of 🍪 from his mother's recipe and a bag of dark chocolate sea salt caramels that just happened to fall into my cart. At Goodwill I got what you'll see in the next picture. And all on gift cards.
A great big shout out goes out to the friends who gave me the gift cards.
Jules Hathaway
Sent from my U.S.Cellular© Smartphone
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