Ask Me No Questions by Marina Budhos (Reviewed by JoonSu)

Fourteen-year-old Nadira and her family are immigrants from Bangladesh living in New York City. Nadira has an eighteen-year-old sister, Aisha who dreams of going to college to become a doctor. Although they were living on expired visas, their lives were going well until 9/11 happens. 9/11 totally changes the family’s life, and it is when Abba (Nadira’s father) decided to flee to the Canadian border hoping for a new life. But Nadira’s dad is arrested and detained at the border, everything goes worse. Now Aisha has to take care of Nadira and pretend to be nothing happened. This is shown in page 30 when Mr. Friedlander, the coach for her math team asks her ‘I was looking for you yesterday, were u sick?’ Nadira lied ‘Nothing big, just a little stomach flu.’ I notice from the story that Nadira were not even allowed to say anything about her status to her best friend, Lily Yee. Aisha is in an absolute panic, she is in fear of going back to Bangladesh. Nadira try to find a way to bring her family together but there is not much for a girl to do with the powerful American government. The story ends with a happy ending where Nadira’s family was granted residency status.

There is a line in the story which I am quite impressed’ The thing is we’ve always been this way-floating, not sure where we belong. In the beginning we lived so that we could pack up any day, fold up all our belongings into the same nylon suitcases…you forget, you don’t really exist here, that this really isn’t your home.’ This expresses the uncertainty of the immigrants in USA. Uncertainty is a typical problems faced by the immigrants. Marina Budhos uses Nadira as the narrator so that the feelings are easily shown throughout the story. More background explanations might have made this book great.