I Thought All My Rage Was Some Bullshit Teen Romance. I Was Wrong.

I picked up All My Rage expecting some teenage romance flick.

I was very wrong.

I'm 28, stuck somewhere in that weird zillennial crisis where it feels like I should have more things figured out by now. I've had my own stuff going on, and I think I read this book at exactly the right time because, for the first time in a while, I felt something again.

A lot of things, actually. Rage. Unfairness. Intimacy. Guilt. Love. That feeling of being lost and wanting someone or something to tell you where to go next.

I didn't expect any of that from this book.

The romance was wholesome, and I liked the boundaries

Sal and Noor's relationship surprised me.

A lot of romance I've read gets much more physical or sexual. This one doesn't need to. Their Pakistani Muslim culture puts boundaries around the relationship, especially around premarital intimacy, and I found myself appreciating that.

I'm not religious, but I get the appeal of having rules and direction.

When everything else is messy, having some kind of structure can be comforting. Religion gives some of the characters that. Family does too. Sometimes Sal and Noor give it to each other. Misbah gives Sal an almost ridiculous amount of faith when he needs it most.

Then there are the consequences. People fuck up in this book and have to live with what they did.

I liked that.

Somehow this made me curious about spirituality

This is probably the part I least expected.

I'm not religious, and reading All My Rage obviously didn't suddenly make me Muslim. But the way Islam exists in these characters' lives made me curious about spirituality and purpose in general.

They have somewhere to turn.

They have guidance when things feel unbearable. They have a framework for forgiveness and responsibility. Even having a religious leader to talk to felt comforting to me.

Maybe it doesn't have to be religion. It could be another person, family, a philosophy, whatever. I just came away thinking that being completely directionless is fucking exhausting, and maybe everyone needs something that points them somewhere.

I've been thinking about that since finishing the book.

Misbah made me think about my mom

I probably need to reread Misbah's chapters because I was confused by parts of them.

But I admired her.

She is dealing with her own pain and still keeps trying to hold things together. What got me most was how much faith she has in Sal. That almost made me bawl because it felt familiar.

There's something about a mother seeing you struggle, seeing you make mistakes, and still believing in you anyway.

It made me think about my own mom and some things I don't really want to put on the internet. The comparison isn't one to one, but that instinct to keep trying to fix things and support your child hit close enough.

So, yeah.

Love your mom.

I understood Noor's pain more than I understood her silence

I empathized with Noor, but I experienced her story more from a distance than I did Sal's or Misbah's.

I understood why she was hurting. What frustrated me was how much she kept to herself.

Maybe I hated it because I hate when I do the same thing.

I also loved how music works for her. That part was easy for me to relate to. Sometimes a song gets closer to what you're feeling than whatever explanation you could come up with yourself.

Sal's decision to finally tell the truth during the hearing hit me in the opposite way.

I keep coming back to honesty as a double edged sword. You can admit something and hurt yourself in the process. You can stay quiet and avoid the immediate consequence, but then you keep carrying the thing around.

I want to be the kind of person who tells the truth even when it costs me. I don't know if I'm always consistent about that, but I want to be.

I think I fell in love with the feeling of forgiveness

This might be the biggest thing the book left me with.

Forgiveness.

Not pretending nothing happened. Sal makes choices that hurt people, and I don't think understanding his reasons magically makes those choices okay. I just found myself leaning toward him because of how badly he wanted to make things right afterward.

He fucked up. There were reasons for it. There were also consequences.

Then he still had to decide what kind of person he wanted to be after that.

That feels much more meaningful to me than forgiveness where everybody says sorry and everything disappears.

The reveal around Misbah's final "forgive" also changed how I understood her. I initially read it one way, then realized she was asking Noor for forgiveness. That stuck with me.

Maybe because forgiveness in this book goes in every direction. People need to forgive other people, ask to be forgiven, and somehow continue living with the things that can't be undone.

The rage feels like pressure

I have pretty high patience, so the parts that made me angry weren't usually Sal or Noor making stupid decisions.

It was the external shit.

Jamie. The cops stopping them. People making assumptions and having enough power that those assumptions suddenly matter.

The rage in the book felt like things building up one by one until somebody eventually bursts.

Family problems. Grief. Racism. Poverty. Abuse. Bad decisions. Then another thing happens. And another.

Eventually, of course someone breaks.

Jamie annoyed the fuck out of me, though. Sometimes he felt forced, like the book needed someone to carry that particular kind of hostility and made sure I knew it.

But I'm also aware that I'm saying that from outside the experience being portrayed.

I'm culturally left leaning and terminally online enough to recognize what the book is talking about, but I don't know firsthand what it is like to be Pakistani American or Muslim in the US. Part of me wondered whether some of the treatment felt more like post 9/11 America than what I imagine somewhere like California is like today.

But that's an assumption from someone who hasn't lived it.

So I'm not going to pretend I can decide how realistic somebody else's experience is. The book at least gave me scenarios and perspectives I hadn't really thought about before.

Now I want to read outside my own culture more

This book made me wonder what else I'm missing.

Even the mention of The Bird King made me want to look for books that let me experience cultures I haven't explored much.

I liked that Pakistani American culture and Islam weren't sitting in the background as decoration. They put guardrails around the whole story. They affect relationships, family expectations, what the characters do, and what they won't do.

That's probably part of why Sal and Noor's relationship worked for me.

I went in expecting those cultural boundaries to make the romance feel limited. Instead, I kind of admired them.

I liked the POV structure more than I expected

The switching between Sal, Noor, and Misbah worked for me.

Each perspective felt encapsulated. I could sit with one person's head for a while and then move into someone else's.

I also liked that Misbah's sections looked different on the page. It's a small physical detail, but it changed the experience of reading her chapters and made them feel separate from the present day perspectives.

I might appreciate those chapters more the second time around because, like I said, I was confused by some of them on the first read.

The ending felt rushed. Or maybe I was just hooked.

This is probably my biggest criticism besides Jamie.

The end moves fast. Things start falling into place and I wanted more time with some of it.

But I'm genuinely not sure if the pacing was actually bad or if I was just so hooked that I suddenly realized I was almost out of book.

Everything eventually felt like it belonged where it ended up. Sal's plan surprised me, and I thought the gesture and reveal were sweet.

I just wanted a little more time there.

I thought I was reading one thing and got something completely different

Before this, I thought All My Rage was going to be some bullshit teen romance.

Instead, it gave me perspectives on how people feel and, more importantly, why they behave the way they do.

Why someone keeps quiet when they should speak.

Why someone makes a terrible decision when the "right" choice looks obvious from the outside.

Why someone needs religion.

Why someone keeps believing in a person who fucked up.

Why someone forgives.

I don't think understanding someone's reasons excuses what they do. But it makes people harder to flatten into good and bad.

I think that's what I was actually looking for without knowing it.

What I took from it

If you want to experience a story shaped heavily by Pakistani American culture, I think there's a lot here. If you just want a book that makes you feel something, I'd recommend it for that too.

For me, though, I finished it with a few things stuck in my head.

You need people to talk to.

You need guidance, whatever that looks like for you.

I want to explore spirituality more.

Love your mom.

And forgive.

I thought I was reading a romance.

Somehow I finished it thinking about how I want to live.