Quarter Two Book Review Lily Cubanski

English 9 Honors 1B

In the novel A Very Large Expanse of Sea, written by Tahereh Mafi, the year is 2002, a
year after 9/11 and it is as hard as ever to be a Muslim girl in America. Shirin is a sixteen-year-
old girl attending yet another high school. Shirin deals with the rude stares and comments and is
starting to lose faith in people, trying to cut herself off from basically everyone in her school
until she meets Ocean. Ocean is the one person who wants to get to know Shirin for real even
though they appear to have nothing in common and Shirin doesn’t know if he’s really different,
or if he’s just like everybody else.
Tahereh Mafi wrote this novel exploring the theme of trust. Throughout the novel, Shirin
tries to distance herself from the kids from her school, afraid of being hurt. She finds it easier to
distance herself from people, instead of trusting them. Shirin has had to deal with the same cycle
of people so many times as seem on page 7 when the author says, “I hated the exhausting, lonely
months it took to settle into a new school; I hated how long it took for the kids around me to
realize I was neither terrifying nor dangerous; I hated the pathetic, soul-sucking effort it took to
finally make a single friend brave enough to sit next to me in public.” We see that Shirin deals
with stuff most kids would never even have to think about enduring. On page 51, the author says,
“There was a part of me that wanted to be friendlier to Ocean, but sometimes it made me really,
actually, physically uncomfortable when he was nice to me. It felt so fake.” Shirin doesn’t know
how to act when someone is actually nice to her because she’s used to keeping a wall up between
her and people. The one thing Shirin doesn’t know is that trust comes with living, and if she
wants to live a normal life, she has to learn to trust people.
In conclusion, I give this novel a five out of five stars. I recommend this book to teens
and adults looking for a very good realistic fictional book to read. This book really opens your
eyes to a very sensitive time and the people that were affected by it. I feel that everyone should
read this book because it undiscovers some of the ugly truths the world must live with.