Set against the backdrop of current affairs in the Middle East, Zarqa Nawaz's Jameela Green Ruins Everything is a hilarious and clever dark comedy, featuring a protagonist with the ambitious goal of getting her debut memoir on the New York Times bestseller list--and she'll do anything to make it happen. Nawaz's action-packed, raucous plot finds lapsed Muslim Jameela Green caught up in a madcap rescue mission to Syria and brought into the core of a terrorist group known by its acronym, DICK.
Jameela lives in the fictional town of Liverspot, N.Dak., with her knitting-obsessed husband, Murray, and their preteen daughter, Lee Lee. When her book launch fails to go as planned, a dejected Jameela seeks spiritual guidance from Ibrahim, the new imam at her local mosque, convinced that an improved rapport with God will jumpstart her book sales. Ibrahim, misidentified by the CIA as a DICK sympathizer, is taken to Syria to be tortured. Jameela vows to rescue him, traveling undercover as a DICK operative. As if that isn't dangerous enough, resourceful Lee Lee follows her mother, having convinced the CIA to send her into a war zone as an underage agent.
Creator of the acclaimed television series Little Mosque on the Prairie, Canadian artist Nawaz (Laughing All the Way to the Mosque) successfully deploys incisive social satire to expose fundamental flaws in U.S. Middle East policy, the misplaced revenge-based narratives of terrorist groups and the unexpected truths that emerge when Jameela confronts her own essential humanity, the New York Times bestseller list all but forgotten. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer