3 stars
OVERALL: A cute YA story when Adam and Zayneb meet and start to get to know each other. I loved the rep of two Muslim characters, of Islamophobia and chronic illness, but sometimes this veered into 'instructional' territory, and was overall much more a contemporary story over a romance for me.
Content warnings: Islamophobic comments, racism, death of a loved one, grief, war, violence, hospitalization

This is a YA cute story about Zayneb and Adam meeting and then starting to get to know each other over ~2 weeks, at somewhat critical times in each of their lives. Adam has recently decided to quit University to focus on his health and new MS diagnosis, and to follow his passion of 'making things' while he still has the physical capabilities to do so. Zayneb has just been suspended for a week from her high school [because misunderstanding] and is struggling with an Islamophobic teacher and how she feels she needs to fight for justice, but this goes against behavioral expectations for her.

I listened to the audiobook, and thought both of the main voices were great.
This book is constructed as if it's a narrative fiction work where the author put together excerpts from these two people's personal journals--I didn't particularly find this structure as one that added to the story, just another way of doing two POVs; felt a hair gimmick-y.
While both characters seemed fully formed and well thought-out, I personally found Zayneb came across as young/immature for her age, while Adam seemed wise and overly stoic for his.

There was also an 'instructional' aspect to this book, I felt it more with Zayneb, when she was describing anything anti-Muslim. For a 'personal journal,' there sure was a LOT of directions and explanation of what Islamophobia was, and the ways it is pervasive and harmful, and the following examples, and what it means to be just and fight against this oppression... There was obviously nothing wrong with those stances, and it was fun to have a main character who cared so much about justice and morality, but I did find it bogging down and tedious to get these snippets of educational info dump that were rather on the nose for non-Muslim readers.

I've not read more than... 2? books with Muslim main characters, so that element was interesting to me. (And it was weird (looking back) that there wasn't a similar educational dump of info surrounding Muslim practices?) But anyway, that was different and cool to me.

This book felt very YA to me, just in tone and overall feel of the characters, and how they were essentially around 18, with other 18 year old friends and interests. I will say, there's a "warning" in the front of the book that says "this is a love story, you've been warned" and I didn't feel like calling this a YA romance was the best categorization. More like YA contemporary with some romance themes? The 'romance' wasn't that believable to me because our two characters essentially have this insta-connection. They each are Muslim and apparently have these 'rules' they've been taught about dating and getting to know someone you're interested in--I was fine with that premise, but they were very into each other after so little interaction... I mean, it just felt so YA, with her fantasizing about him seeing her hair and him *gasp* kissing her... And I don't know what is recommended be told to young Muslim kids (I didn't grow up with any significant religious instruction, maybe this is just a religious thing:), but the fact that both of our main characters, Zayneb in particular, were calling their thoughts about the other as 'lustful' and bad--that didn't sit well with me. She was imagining him sweeping her up into a big kiss, and then said "oh, where has all this lust come from?? I must stop!" and I was just a bit exasperated.