To be honest I went in knowing nothing other than @itsbitsyginny loved it. And that’s basically all you need to know. I don’t want to get too deep into specifics, because I think that the less you know when you read it the better. What I didn’t like Towards the beginning Vanja’s character fell a little flat for me, but I think this was intentional (she was meant to be a product of her system.) As she gained independence, I found myself liking her more and more. What I liked The dystopia here is done so well, as is the confusing nature of reality. Where Amatkareally shines is in it’s world, and in the commentary it makes. I loved the concept and what was done with the goo. While it’s not particularly quickly paced, I was enthralled and wanted to keep reading the entire time to find out more about what was happening, and watching this strange world unspool was so fascinating. It’s also heartbreaking to see what these people have to go through, and what happens to some clearly good people. The way Tidbeck handles these moments is so skillful and made this surprisingly emotional. Overview Jeff Vandermeer was thanked in the acknowledgments, and when I saw that I went “oh that makes so much sense.” Would I recommend I really enjoyed it, it was disturbing, unsettling, strange, and brilliantly creative, but I probably wouldn’t recommend it to a lot of people. The things that make Amatka great are things that could also turn a lot of people off of it. That being said, I loved it and if you like slower, weird and deeply disquieting books, you’d probably also enjoy it.

This is a brilliant memoir about queerness and faith. Lamya H uses figures from the Quran to explore her identity, reimagining the text through a feminist and queer lens.

This balance is delicate, and the genius of it is difficult to articulate. It's not that Lamya is insisting that the Quran is a secretly radical feminist text, but that faith is personal and informed by our own lived experience, recentering its purpose.

Instead of the Quran being a simple list of rules for Lamya to follow, she challenges the text through her own perspective, interpreting figures and stories not as metaphors but as a way of understanding her life. In doing so, Lamya proves that queer Muslim identity is not the contradiction it's perceived to be but a lived reality that can be understood through Islam itself.

Lamya challenges not only her community but also the scripts of Western, especially white, queerness. Especially, Lamya defies the idea that queerness has to look a certain way or that it must follow a predetermined doctrine to be considered authentic.

Lamya recenters the more difficult aspects of queer identity, especially as it intersects with Muslim identity, rather than framing it as something purely liberating or empowering. The process of coming to terms with your sexuality and gender is often slow and frightening, and even more so when your community struggles to understand and accept it.

In a sense, Lamya creates their own queer ethic: sometimes the point is not to proclaim your identity to the entire world but to speak only where truth can be held.

This recentered framework is especially important because it confronts the pressure often placed upon queer Muslims. Lamya has to speak not only for themself, but because these stories are so rarely spoken about, let alone published, they have to speak for all Muslim, Arab, immigrant, and religious queers. It's an impossible burden for one memoir to carry, and Hijab Butch Blues is intimately aware of it, critiquing the demand for visibility while still inevitably being caught inside it.

Each chapter continuously returns the reader to the complicated existence of intersecting marginalization. Lamya tirelessly examines the contradictions they are forced to exist within, identifying at times as an unrecognizable jinn, seen but never truly understood.

It's a poignant, vulnerable exploration of not only Lamya's identity but also an existence that is relatable to so many queer people who experience compounding oppression and judgment.

Equally as important is Lamya's constant questioning of binaries of all kinds, but especially the binary of gender. They explore womanhood not as a gender identity but as a political one, identifying with radical feminist values but fitting into neither a "man" or "woman" category. As such, they directly critique the limitations of mainstream Western queerness and its imposition of binary legibility.

Much like Lamya's real life, the use of religion in Hijab Butch Blues is not ornamental. The very structure rejects the idea that queerness and Islam are mutually exclusive. It's an incredibly original format that makes the memoir extraordinary, and I often felt like I was being invited in to the building of an entire interpretive world that would normally be kept private and secret.

For all of its heavy-hitting emotion - anger, frustration, grief, confusion - the ending lands in an incredibly soft and sensitive place. The concluding chapters feel less symbolically loaded and more resolved than complicated, which fits Lamya's lived experience but risks making the memoir feel like it wraps up too neatly.

Still, maybe that's the point. Eventually, you have to stop turning every moment into an existential question and live within contradiction. Not with an identity defined by religion, social scripts, or cultural conditioning, but in conversation with them. At its best, Hijab Butch Blues shows that identity is not a problem to be solved but a set of stories and meanings that have to be reread, recontextualized, and rewritten to survive.