How far would you go to have the ability to be with the person that you wanted to spend the rest of your life with? What if your country and everyone around you believed that your love was sinful, and something to be ashamed of? This is the question at the heart of If You Could Be Mine, and Farizan does a wonderful job of addressing it in a way that is approachable for most teens.
The narrator, seventeen year old Sahar is definitely a teenage girl who is being pushed and pulled into womanhood in fits and starts, which allows for occasional glimpses of both incredible maturity, and the kind of naiveté that you only see in someone whose heart has not been broken yet. The story takes place in modern day Iran, and it does an excellent job of showing that part of the world to teens who have not yet been exposed to it.
The writing feels like a seventeen year old wrote it. Not that it is lacking in any way, but that the writing has both a bluntness and a sparseness that I associate with teenagers. For example, from the first page: "We were six. We didn't hear head scarves then. We were little girls, not 'whores of Babylon,' to be met by the scrutinizing eye of any asshole with a beard." This writing style works extremely well for this book, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a gentle romance or a young girl's coming of age story. If you are worried about swears, the above quote is actually the only swear that I remember in the entire book.
