Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know by Samira Ahmed | a fun

Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know by Samira Ahmed

April 7, 2020 from Soho Teen
YA Contemporary
Goodreads | Amazon

It’s August in Paris and 17-year-old Khayyam Maquet—American, French, Indian, Muslim—is at a crossroads. This holiday with her professor parents should be a dream trip for the budding art historian. But her maybe-ex-boyfriend is probably ghosting her, she might have just blown her chance at getting into her dream college, and now all she really wants is to be back home in Chicago figuring out her messy life instead of brooding in the City of Light.

Two hundred years before Khayyam’s summer of discontent, Leila is struggling to survive and keep her true love hidden from the Pasha who has “gifted” her with favored status in his harem. In the present day—and with the company of a descendant of Alexandre Dumas—Khayyam begins to connect allusions to an enigmatic 19th-century Muslim woman whose path may have intersected with Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Delacroix, and Lord Byron.

Echoing across centuries, Leila and Khayyam’s lives intertwine, and as one woman’s long-forgotten life is uncovered, another’s is transformed.

4 stars

I’m going to be honest: I went into this knowing next to nothing about it, so imagine my delight when I realized it was about a French-American Muslim girl set in Paris on an art history sleuthing mission mixed with poetry and philosophy. Like, this hit the nail on the head for what I like, and honestly, I was hooked.