I went on holiday! – I went to Marrakech with my family and, looking back on it, it was fun. But at the time, it seemed like everything didn’t go according to plan. But I did enjoy it, despite the majority of us getting sick towards the end.
(Please excuse the messy feature image. I made a much better one but for some reason, the file didn’t save properly so I had to rush a new one 
)2016 was a strange year in terms of reading – I read a total of 85 books, much less than last year, and there were many highs and lows. A resolution of mine was to read more books I know I would like but I feel like this year my negative to positive reviews ratio was very uneven. But I did find some new favourites. So… on to the post! My top six favourite reads of 2016!
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the Young Muslim Writer’s Award.Despite me getting episcleritis (inflammation in my eye) a couple of days before, it was still so much fun! Congratulations to everyone who was nominated and who won!
It was a great event with an amazing atmosphere! There were so many amazing moments but I know I’ll have to list some of my favourites.
The best part of the day was meeting Zoya. I met Zoya online after she commented on my Muslim Characters in YA post and we had spoken to each other a few times over the months. And we saw each other face to face for the first time here at the event. It was amazing to meet someone you’ve spoken to online for real! Zoya was actually nominated for an award in the Key Stage 3 poetry section and won!
At the end of the awards, there was some time for networking but, unfortunately, we had to leave since my eye started aching a lot. And I had finished my eye drops so it was very painful 😦
While I really wished I spoke to more people, I’d like to end this post with a thank you to Zainub Chohan who invited me to the event and is basically the backbone of the #YMWA. It was a great event and wouldn’t have been possible with her. Thank you to all the judges, performers, nominees and presenters. Can’t wait to see what new talent we’ll see in 2017.
#DiversityDecBingo is a month long reading challenge hosted by some really cool people. (names are in the graphic below) The challenge is to encourage people to read books by marginalised authors and/or about marginalised characters. The rules are pretty simple: all you have to do it pick 5 squares in a row and read one book per prompt. I’ll be posting pictures and tweeting about it on Instagram and twitter (I’m @zaheerah on insta/ @zaheerahkhalik on twitter)
→ The Star-touched Queen
→Written in the Stars
→ If I Was Your Girl
→ Hero
→ Every Heart A Doorway
I read 5 books this month!
Rating: ★★★☆☆
* I received a proof of this book from the publisher. This in no way affected my opinion of the book.
Initiate is set in a world where humanity has retreated below the ice sheets of Antarctica as the land above is completely inhabitable. Riga Garrison is a mere member of this restricted society until she sees a whale. An animal once thought to be extinct. She begins to question the very institute that controls her life and realises that everything isn’t as it seems.
I think a tricky thing is with books with these hidden societies underground is that there’s so many of them. You’d have to sift through a lot to get to the ones you’ll truly enjoy. I’m not saying Initiate is a bad book. I actually quite liked this. The premise of this story reminds me of our current environmental situation, a bit of a cautionary tale, it would seem to us.
“We were the people who had polluted our own planet so much through our persistent, never-satiated greed that we had caused irreversible and extensive damage to our planet’s climate through global warming. We were the people who had allowed our own waste emissions to consume us, to poison the very air we breathed and the water we drank until we had to build bigger machines to purify the water needed by an out-of control world population hungry for an ever-increasing demand of clean water, energy, and fuel. We were the people who had had decades of research to warn us of environmental collapse, yet who ignored it in the noisy distraction of political bargaining..”
Initiate is quite inventive in the world it’s created in. While I thought it was very stereotypical at first, it had my interest, especially when Rigs encounters the whale which triggers off a reaction she could’ve never expected. She finds herself on the run and having to a make a life-changing decision which could change everything. She handles things quite maturely and her development was enjoyable.
Her love interest is … okay, I guess. While I never found myself swooning over them, they made sense to be together but I think it would’ve worked much better if they were already together before the start of the novel.
When the big plot twist and the secret is revealed about the world above I was very confused. I think it may be due to the fact I had a very different impression of how this book was going to go because it’s a complete 180 to what I had expected. And I think because of that, I’m quite intrigued with how this story will carry on. Because I actually have no idea what to expect!
The biggest issue I had was pacing. I think the events happened quite quickly which meant there wasn’t much suspense, in my opinion. And there could’ve been better development of what the Initiate actually is because they didn’t really come across as threatening as they could’ve been.
Overall, as I said before, Initiate is imaginative and in a world which has captured my attention. Around 3/4 of the way, my interest did drop but the ending and the preview of Book Two have certainly made me want to keep track of this series.
as told by zaheerah 