Are You There God? It’s Me, Mariam: All HAIL MARIAM by Huda Al-Marashi

Children’s books are a business like any other out there. As such, because there are just so many works of literature out in a given year for the young, a good elevator pitch can really cut through the treacle. Here’s an example: Heroine is only Muslim in a Catholic school. Right there! That’s a hook! It’s got religion (which generally doesn’t get much attention from trade publishers), potential conflict (both internal and external), and the potential for a lot more. Best of all? It made me curious. What’s the backstory of such a book? Who would write it?

I needed answers.

Hail, Mariam by Huda Al-Marashi was released last month to great reviews. And if my elevator pitch struck you as insufficient, here’s how its publisher describes it:

Sixth grade wasn’t supposed to be this complicated.

Iraqi American Mariam Hassan transfers to a local Catholic school and before her first day her parents remind her that she might be the first Muslim her classmates have ever met. No big deal, right? Just represent an entire religion while making new friends, keeping up with schoolwork, and figuring out who she is.

When Mariam’s younger sister, Salma, is diagnosed with a serious lung condition, her family faces endless doctor visits and sleepless nights. Mariam tries to lighten their burden and keep her own problems to herself—including the fact that she’s just been cast as Mary in the school’s Christmas nativity play.

Mariam wants to honor her faith and her new community, but she’s terrified of crossing a religious line. Can a Muslim girl be the lead in a Christian story? What will her family think? And why does she feel like every decision she makes represents all Muslims?

Mariam discovers that faith, much like friendships, isn’t about perfection—it’s about connection. As she leans on her family, friends, and school community, she begins to see the power of interfaith cooperation and learns she doesn’t have to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders.

Questions? I had them. And Huda was kind enough to provide answers to them all:

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Betsy Bird: Huda! Thank you so much for talking to me about your latest today! Now your publisher is selling this book as, “a heartfelt and humorous interfaith coming of age story for fans of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret“, which, truth be told, is a rather good elevator pitch. This isn’t your first walk in the middle grade park, of course (Grounded obtaining a Walter Dean Myers Honor award and all). Still, this is an ambitious idea for a middle grade. Give us a little bit of its origin story. Where did Hail Mariam come from? 

Huda Al-Marashi: Thank you so much for having me here, Betsy! Hail Mariam is pulled straight from my memories of sixth grade. I was also the only Muslim girl in my Catholic middle school, and I wrestled with a lot of the questions Mariam faces in the book. While Mariam’s learning curve is quite truncated, I went on to attend a Catholic high school and Jesuit university. All those years of being steeped in another faith tradition taught me to see the commonalities and patterns across people of faith. Even when we have major theological differences, people express their faith in such similar ways. That insight felt like a kind of bilingualism that allowed me to comfortably move between these two religious traditions in a way that I wished more people had the opportunity to experience. It got me thinking that maybe I could share some of this transformation in a coming of age novel that showed that movement away from the black and white thinking that is so common in childhood toward the tolerance and acceptance that is absolutely critical for us to carry into our adult lives.

That said, even though I was inspired by these rather lofty interfaith goals, this book is about so much more than religion. I also drew heavily on so many of my experiences as an eldest daughter in an Iraqi American immigrant family. Mariam’s deep desire to be recognized by her family and her teachers closely mirrors my own young, people-pleasing heart, and her attempts to spare her overburdened parents by navigating the struggles she faces at school all on her own are choices I made, too.

BB: Faith and religion don’t come up in books for older kids all that often, and when they do it seems to be more in the context of setting the main character apart rather than exploring spirituality in any significant way. As you wrote this book, how did you make that balance? And for that matter (no small questions here) how do you even write a book about faith for kids in the 21st century anyway? 

Huda: I knew I had to stay very close to Mariam’s internal journey to make this work, and I also knew I had to start her off in a place of very obvious, if not exaggerated, misbelief so that the trajectory of thought we’re following in this story was clear. Mariam’s biggest transformation comes from her own belief system so I told the story from a first person point of view to allow my reader to be in Mariam’s head, watching her ideas evolve in response to the events around her.

I also leaned into Mariam’s discomfort with Christian iconography, like the crucifix, which is an image that has been made normal to us through exposure and familiarity but can be quite jarring for someone who has not encountered these symbols before. Muslims in the west are well-versed in their own “strangeness.” None of us have been spared knowing how the majority views every aspect of our practice, but this was an opportunity for me to offer that frustrating experience of being misunderstood to readers from a dominant faith tradition.

As far as writing this book for 21^st century kids, it was some of the conversations I had about Grounded that reminded of the ways that kids still are wrestling with big religious questions. At one visit to an Islamic school actually, a child asked me, “What kind of bad things do kids say about Muslims in regular schools? And another child asked me if I knew that there are people who speak Arabic but who are Christian. I was already drafting Hail Mariam at the time, but those discussions reaffirmed my hunch that kids are ready for conversations about interfaith tolerance and the differences between culture and religion.

BB: Absolutely. I read a lot of middle grade books in a given year. And inevitably, if you read enough of them, you begin to slot them into different categories. Some are dead serious on deadly serious topics, and there’s a place for that. But others have an ability to balance out all that potential or actual trauma with a certain amount of lightness and humor. You’re no stranger to that. There are funny bits here. So how do you strike that balance? How do you make a book simultaneously funny without shying away from what you’re trying to say/convey?

Huda: Thank you so much for that. It means a lot to me that I was able to strike that balance because it did not come naturally! I have to give a lot of credit to my literary agent who saw the humor in my early drafts at a time when my manuscript probably did fall into that deadly serious category. She very simply said, “You know you can just be funny,” and it was such freeing advice. I had been so focused on what I was trying to say that I lost sight of how I was saying it. In that next revision, I gave myself permission to bring in as much humor and levity as I wanted, and I found that once I locked into Mariam’s voice, it was much easier to carry it throughout the text.

BB: Since you share more than a few similarities to Mariam, I’m curious about sixth grade you. What books did you like to read when you were her age? You obviously wouldn’t have found any of them to even remotely mirror what you were experiencing, so what did you like instead?

Huda: Oh, to be a Muslim girl in sixth grade now, when we have such a wealth of incredible books by Muslim authors to choose from. I can only imagine what Huda Fahmy’s Huda F graphic novels would have meant to me. That’s exactly how my classmates said my name. Who-duh, with an emphasis on the syllable “duh.” But back then, I had be content with Sweet Valley High. One of the girls in my class brought her entire collection to share, and I couldn’t read those books fast enough. But I will say that we also read a lot of classic literature at my Catholic middle school. We read quite a bit of John Steinbeck (I grew up in the Monterey Bay area), George Orwell, and I remember being very moved by Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Although all those books were wonderful, it did render me invisible, and I didn’t even know that books with characters like myself even existed. In my mind, literature came from a world that I was not a part of. It wasn’t until college that I read a novel with an Arab or Muslim protagonist, and even though these were mainly works of translation from the Arab world, that experience was transformative for me in ways that I’d probably need a whole essay to describe.

BB: You must have had a fair amount to pack into this book. What did you have to cut out? What didn’t make the final draft? And do you miss any of it?

Huda: In my early drafts, I had a lot of scriptural references and journal entries from Mariam to show her evolution of thought. When my agent gave me that bit of advice to lean into the humor, I realized that those moments were also weighing down the tone and the pacing of the book. In previous books, I’ve had to take out things that I missed, but in this one, the shift was so necessary. I liked it so much better without the weight of those moments, and I don’t know that I would have ever seen that for myself—which just speaks to the incredible gift of good feedback.

BB: Is this a standalone novel or do you think we might see Mariam come back in a future book?

Huda: In my mind, this is a standalone novel, but with Mariam being so close to who I was in sixth grade, I’m sure parts of her are going to show up in every character I write.

BB: Finally, what’s next for you? What else are you working on these days, kids-book-wise or otherwise? 

Huda: Right now, I’m working on another middle grade novel. I’m still developing the premise for that one, but I have no doubt it will center on the themes that seem to crop up in everything I write—issues of identity and faith and how that plays out in immigrant families and their diasporic communities.

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Huge thanks to Huda for taking the time to answer my questions today. Thanks too to Kaitlin Kneafsey and the team at Penguin Young Readers for helping to put this all together. Hail, Mariam is, as I say, on shelves now, so don’t hesitate to pick up a copy for a kid ASAP.

Filed under: Interviews