Asian American Literature Fans

By Stephen Hong Sohn

The Salaam Reads imprint over at Simon and Schuster’s Children’s Division is one of the best responses to the “We Need Diverse Books” campaign that I’ve seen. It presumably targets the acquisitions of books related to Arab American/ Middle Eastern American/ Near Eastern contexts. One recent publication coming out of that imprint is Karuna Riazi’s The Gauntlet (Salaam Reads, 2017), which reads like an Oriental tale combined with the story from Jumanji.

Here is the Kirkus Reviews evaluation of the text: “A young hijabi finds herself, her brother, and her friends trapped in a very dangerous game. Upper East Side Bangladeshi-American Farah's having a hard time clicking with her old friends from Queens when they come to her 12th birthday party. But when her trying-but-adorable little brother—he has ADHD—vanishes into a mysterious board game called The Gauntlet of Blood and Sand, white Essie and brown-skinned Alex don't hesitate to join Farah in jumping in to rescue him. Once in the game, they are given three challenges—and failure to win all three will trap them there. Farah's desperation to find Ahmad heightens these deadly stakes. In her debut, Riazi gives readers a Muslim protagonist who resists genre clichés: she's resolute rather than feisty, smart but aware of her weaknesses. Secondary characterization is not so strong; Essie and Alex seem more types than people. The superb worldbuilding offers an ever shifting topography, rather like an Escher vision of the East. Riazi's lush descriptions reject exoticization, Farah's cultural familiarity positioning readers within her perspective: a ‘sweet sunset pink mosque, beautifully domed and proudly placed,’ reminds her of buildings she's seen in Bangladesh and India, ‘sharing a linked history of wide arches and rounded roofs.’ Riazi combines such tropes as a magic map with the winningly original lizard Resistance corps, offering just the right mix of familiarity and newness. A solid middle-grade fantasy and an auspicious debut.”

I’d have to agree with the majority of the assessments. Even my earlier description of the novel as something deriving out of the Oriental tale is not quite accurate because the narrative perspective is given over to a character who wouldn’t see jinns and other such creatures as necessarily all the strange. At the same time, the novel’s intriguing conceit about being trapped inside of a game has larger ramifications that make the stakes of this particular work far higher than what you might expect out of a middle grade novel. At one point, they come to realize that most of the people they are meeting in the game have, in one way or another, been trapped inside the game. Riazi must have us suspend our sense of danger because we don’t really want to think of children, or anyone for that matter, really falling prey to a world ruled by a fearsome architect who wants nothing more than to beat gameplayers and trap them for all eternity.

We’re not surprised when the threesome finally escape the game, but they also take with them another former player, now an adult, who had been missing for some decades. This player had been in the game during a period of time when Farah’s aunt first engaged The Gauntlet as a child, so these two adults are reunited at the end. But the realist convictions of this text create additional problems for the conclusion that Riazi can only sidestep by concluding the novel: after all, the police have been searching for Farah; Farah’s aunt has given Farah’s mother a presumable explanation for her disappearance, which I’m sure could not have gone over well; and finally, what does one do when one has disappeared for decades and trapped inside a game? These issues are not worked out, but it’s a testament to Riazi’s unique narrative conceit that we’re willing to let these conundrums slide by, especially in the hopes that there will be another installment.

Buy the Book Here:

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu