The Beauty of Your Face by Sahar Mustafah

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the accidental lockdown at our high school. Alarms went off and teachers and students huddled in silence until the police permitted us to leave our safe places. Then, came the tears and the relief …

THE BEAUTY OF YOUR FACE by Sahar Mustafah is an emotional debut novel about Afaf Rahman, a dedicated educator and principal of Nurrideen School for Girls, a Muslim school in the suburbs of Chicago. It is there one day that Afaf comes face to face with a gun man.  Mustafah uses flashbacks to tell the story of Afaf and her family.  Noting, for example, the experience of unconscious bias when a loved one is ill and the nurse at the hospital “speaks loudly and slowly to them, as though they can’t understand her. It’s a habit Afaf has observed in white people.” Numerous references to religion and cultural aspects like Afaf’s father’s music and her decision to wear a headscarf are interspersed, educating some readers and mirroring others. THE BEAUTY OF YOUR FACE also describes the pain and sorrow that the shooter, a disappointed, radicalized building maintenance worker feels. Overall, though, this is a novel which is full of hope that we can do more to recognize and appreciate about our shared humanity: “so many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.” Like her main character, the author is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants and an educator. She lives and teaches high school students outside of Chicago so I am hoping we can invite her as a guest speaker (perhaps for Lit Fest?) to continue the dialogue in the future.