Love From Mecca To Medina

Description

By (author) Ali S. K.

Short /annotation:
Now in paperback: Adam and Zayneb are back in this surprising and romantic paperback sequel to the novel Becky Albertalli called “bighearted” and “wildly charming,” Love From A to Z!

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On the trip of a lifetime, Adam and Zayneb must find their way back to each other in this surprising and romantic sequel to the “bighearted, wildly charming” (Becky Albertalli, New York Times bestselling author) Love from A to Z that’s a “contemplative exploration of faith, love, and the human condition” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Adam and Zayneb. Perfectly matched. Painfully apart.

Adam is in Doha, Qatar, making a map of the Hijra, a historic migration from Mecca to Medina, and worried about where his next paycheck will come from. Zayneb is in Chicago, where school and extracurricular stresses are piling on top of a terrible frenemy situation, making her miserable.

Then a marvel occurs: Adam and Zayneb get the chance to spend Thanksgiving week on the Umrah, a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, in Saudi Arabia. Adam is thrilled; it’s the reboot he needs and an opportunity to pray for a hijra in real life: to migrate to Zayneb in Chicago. Zayneb balks at the trip at first, having envisioned another kind of vacation, but then decides a spiritual reset is calling her name too. And they can’t wait to see each other—surely, this is just what they both need.

But the trip is nothing like what they expect, from the appearance of Adam’s former love interest in their traveling group to the anxiety gripping Zayneb when she’s supposed to be “spiritual.” As one wedge after another drives them apart while they make their way through rites in the holy city, Adam and Zayneb start to wonder: was their meeting just an oddity after all? Or can their love transcend everything else like the greatest marvels of the world?

Biographical note:
S. K. Ali is the author of Saints and Misfits, a finalist for the American Library Association’s 2018 William C. Morris Award and the winner of the APALA Honor Award and Middle East Book Honor Award; and Love from A to Z, a Today show Read with Jenna Book Club selection. Both novels were named best YA books of the year by various media including Entertainment Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. She is also the author of Misfit in Love and Love from Mecca to Medina. You can find Sajidah online at SKAliBooks.com and follow her on Instagram @SKAliBooks, TikTok @SKAliBooks, and on Twitter @SajidahWrites.

Excerpt:
Artifact One: Hanna’s Little Kaaba on a Glass Stand Interpretive Label: We Begin at the Center of the Journey

ARTIFACT ONE: HANNA’S LITTLE KAABA ON A GLASS STAND INTERPRETIVE LABEL: WE BEGIN AT THE CENTER OF THE JOURNEY
HANNA STARED AT THE TEENY gold Arabic calligraphy that skirted a quarter of an inch from the top of the black plastic cube set on a glass platform.

Perhaps gazing at the souvenir Kaaba could ignite the feeling of being in Mecca with her dad this past summer.

Alas, no—all it did was make her want to run to get a magnifying glass to see if any of the Arabic words on the souvenir were the actual ones from the actual Kaaba in Mecca. She sighed and put the Kaaba back in its blue velvet pouch.

She would have to start at the start.

She pulled the laptop from the coffee table onto the couch she was lying on, stomach down, and began two-finger-typing the introduction for her social studies project.

The Mecca That Started It All

By Hanna Chen, 8B, Ms. McMann,

Doha International School

The mecca of basketball is Madison Square Garden. The mecca of fashion is Paris (or New York or Tokyo, depending on who you ask). The mecca of movies