THE BEAUTY OF YOUR FACE

As a shooter makes his way through a Muslim girls’ school, a woman thinks back on her life.

Afaf is 10 when her older sister disappears. Her parents, Palestinian immigrants, are devastated, her mother especially. They and Afaf and her younger brother, Majeed, struggle to maintain a life, and while Afaf’s father turns increasingly to alcohol, Afaf herself, as she becomes a teenager, turns to boys. It takes a car crash to spring them out of their self-destruction. As they turn toward faith, Afaf and her father find comfort and community in the Islamic Center of Greater Chicago, but their problems at home seem to multiply. Mustafah’s (Code of the West, 2017) novel is frequently moving, especially in her depictions of Afaf’s inner state. The sections of the book that describe Afaf’s early life are especially vivid. But these passages alternate with shorter chapters set in the present day, when an older Afaf now serves as principal of a Muslim school for girls. Over the course of a morning, a shooter makes his way through the school, rifle in hand. In these chapters, Mustafah switches from Afaf’s point of view to the shooter’s, making every effort to understand his interior state and the life that has led him to his actions. But unlike Afaf and her father, the shooter feels like a stock character, and his chapters, though suspenseful, become unwelcome interruptions to the novel’s main action: the slow unraveling of a single family. That’s where this book’s heart seems to be.

At times, the novel feels almost like two separate stories jammed together.