A Girl Like That

Overview

Tanaz Bhathena's debut novel begins at the end: Zarin Wadia and Porus Dumasia are killed in a car crash on a Jeddah highway, and the story then works backward to explain how they got there. The structure functions almost like a mystery, with each chapter peeling back another layer of rumor, misunderstanding, and grief.

Told through several rotating narrators, the novel centers on Zarin, a teenage girl whose reputation in her tight-knit Parsi community has calcified into something she can't escape. Orphaned and raised by an aunt and uncle who alternate between neglect and control, Zarin pushes against the restrictions placed on girls in Saudi Arabia, and her connection with Porus, a quieter boy from a more sheltered home, becomes fuel for the gossip that follows her everywhere.

As the narrative moves toward the night of the accident, Bhathena widens the cast of voices — classmates, family members, a teacher — each holding a different, incomplete version of who Zarin really was.

A Portrait of Reputation and Restriction

Much of the novel's tension comes from the gap between how Zarin is perceived and what she actually experiences. Bhathena uses the multiple-narrator format to show how a teenage girl's choices get flattened into a single story by the people around her, while the girl herself remains largely unheard until the book lets her speak. That structural choice — withholding Zarin's own account until late in the novel — has been read as a deliberate commentary on how young women's reputations are built by others before they're allowed to define themselves.

The setting is also central to the book's reception: it's one of relatively few YA novels to depict daily life for a religious-minority teenager in Saudi Arabia, following Zarin through a world of guardianship rules, gender-segregated spaces, and expatriate community pressures. Reviewers, including a widely cited endorsement from novelist Jodi Picoult, have noted how unfamiliar and specific this setting feels within a genre that rarely ventures there. Within Bhathena's own body of work, the novel established the Jeddah milieu and interest in constrained, watched female adolescence that recurs in her later fiction.

Why A Girl Like That Has Been Challenged

Most challenges to the novel cite its suitability for high school readers, generally in the grades 9 through 12 range where it's most commonly shelved or assigned. Objecting parents and community members argue that the book's realism goes further than they consider appropriate for that audience, pointing specifically to scenes involving teen sexual activity, underage drinking and drug use, and blunt language.

A second recurring complaint concerns the novel's treatment of sexual assault and coercion, which some reviewers find necessary to its honest portrayal of the dangers Zarin faces, and which challengers argue is too graphic or distressing to present without more context or warning. The book's unmarried teenage romance, set against a legal backdrop that forbids such relationships, has also drawn objections from those who see it as normalizing behavior at odds with the values they want reinforced in a school setting. In this catalog's tracking, the book has accumulated 3 state-level and 7 district-level challenges on these grounds.