Showing results by author "Sabina Khan" in All Categories

Seventeen-year-old Pakistani immigrant, Zara Hossain, has been leading a fairly typical life in Corpus Christi, Texas, since her family moved there for her father to work as a pediatrician. While dealing with the Islamophobia that she faces at school, Zara has to lay low, trying not to stir up any trouble and jeopardize their family's dependent visa status while they await their green card approval, which has been in process for almost nine years. But one day her tormentor, star football player Tyler Benson, takes things too far, leaving a threatening note in her locker.

Seventeen-year-old Rukhsana Ali tries her hardest to live up to her conservative Muslim parents' expectations, but lately she's finding that impossible to do. She rolls her eyes when they blatantly favor her brother and saves her crop tops and makeup for parties her parents don't know about. Luckily, only a few more months stand between her carefully monitored life in Seattle and her new life at Caltech. But when her parents catch her kissing her girlfriend Ariana, all of Rukhsana's plans fall apart.

Mehar hasn't been back to India since she and her mother moved away when she was only four. Hasn't visited her father, her grandmother, her family, or the home where she grew up. Why would she? Her father made it clear that she's not his priority when he chose not to come to the US with them. But when her father announces his engagement to socialite Naz, Mehar reluctantly agrees to return for the wedding. Maybe she and her father can heal their broken relationship. And after all, her father is Indian royalty, and his home is a palace—the wedding is going to be a once-in-a-lifetime affair.

Seventeen-year-old Mira Fuller-Jensen was adopted by her moms at birth. All she knows about her biological mother is that she was a high school student from India who returned to India after giving birth. Although Mira loves her moms, she's always felt out of place in her mostly white community. So when Mira finds an old box with letters from her birth mother, she sees a way to finally capture that feeling of belonging. Her mother writes that if Mira can forgive her for putting her up for adoption, she should find a way to travel to India for her eighteenth birthday and meet her.

Conceived in the aftermath of the American Civil War and the grief that swept France over the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the Statue of Liberty has been a potent symbol of the nation's highest ideals since it was unveiled in 1886. In Enlightening the World, Yasmin Sabina Khan provides a fascinating new account of the design of the statue and the lives of the people who created it, along with the tumultuous events in France and the United States that influenced them.