Season of Stories is back!!!! For those of you who may not remember, Season of Stories is this opportunity where people receive one short story a week for the fall season to encourage readers to give the short story collection a try. Each day for 4 days, portions of the story are given until you finally have a cohesive story. It’s a really interesting project and I love getting this little treat in my inbox every morning. Anyways, this is the first short story of this Season. You may know of Hasan Minhaj from his comedy shows. He is a very funny comedian who has his own show on Netflix and is a senior correspondent on the Daily Show. This story of his is actually part of the Moth short story collection, and The Moth is an amazing podcast that I’ve listened to for AGES! They have some very interesting and diverse content there so I would definitely recommend people check it out if they love short stories. Anyways, enough of my blabbering, here is my review:
When you’re one of the few brown people in a town that is predominantly Caucasian, it can be hard to fit in. But when the new girl at school is actually nice to Hasan, he thinks that his luck might change. As they become closer friends, Hasan finds that it is easy to be himself around her. So when prom comes around, and his math teacher challenges everyone in class to attend, Hasan considers going with her. This decision leads to a night that he will never forget.
As someone who is a minority, I fully sympathized with teenage Hasan. He struggled to fit in just liked I did and he had his fair share of insecurities. This story, which started off funny enough, quickly revealed itself to be a lot deeper than expected. I loved that this story gave me pause and made me reevaluate my initial opinion. It made me see a different perspective from my own and it was quite insightful. I really enjoyed reading this story, and it reminded me of all of the wonderful stories I would hear on the Moth podcast. If this story is to be taken as an accurate representation of the kind of material in the short story collection, then I would recommend this book to every person I know. This story is a gem and I have no doubt that the rest of the collection will be, too!
Happy reading ~