Does My Head Look Big in This?

Overview

Randa Abdel-Fattah's novel follows Amal, a Palestinian-Muslim teenager attending a prestigious private school in the suburbs of Melbourne. Partway through Year Eleven, Amal makes a decision that sets the story in motion: she will wear the hijab every day, not just at the mosque or on special occasions, but to class, to the mall, and everywhere else her ordinary teenage life takes her.

The novel tracks the ripple effects of that choice. Amal contends with curious classmates, a few openly hostile ones, and teachers who aren't quite sure how to react, all while managing the usual preoccupations of adolescence: crushes, friendships, family expectations, and figuring out who she wants to be.

What distinguishes the book is its refusal to treat faith and teenage identity as opposing forces. Amal is funny, fashion-conscious, and stubborn in equal measure, and the narrative insists that covering her hair changes how the world sees her without changing who she is underneath.

A Coming-of-Age Story Reframed Through Faith

Abdel-Fattah, herself an Australian writer of Egyptian and Palestinian descent, uses the familiar architecture of the school-set coming-of-age novel and places a visibly Muslim girl at its center, a perspective rarely given the lead role in that genre. The hijab functions less as a plot device than as a lens: through Amal's decision, the book examines how a single visible marker of identity can reorganize a teenager's social world overnight, inviting assumptions from strangers and intimacy-testing questions from friends alike.

The novel also sits inside a broader post-9/11 literary moment, when Western media coverage of Muslim communities skewed heavily toward conflict and suspicion. Abdel-Fattah's choice to write a protagonist who is self-assured, funny, and in control of her own narrative pushed back against that climate, and the book has since been read in classrooms as an entry point for discussing religious identity, immigration, and belonging from the inside rather than as an external subject of study.

Why Does My Head Look Big in This? Has Been Challenged

Much of the scrutiny the novel has attracted centers on its direct, first-person treatment of Islam, including Amal's own reasoning about faith, modesty, and why she chooses religious observance for herself rather than having it imposed by family. Some reviewers and parents have objected to a young-adult novel presenting a positive, interior view of Muslim religious practice, arguing that it amounts to promoting a specific faith tradition in a secular classroom setting. Others have raised concerns about passages touching on dating, body image, and teenage social friction, material that recurs across the genre but draws added attention here given the book's religious subject matter. The novel has been challenged or restricted in 1 state and 2 districts tracked in this catalog, with objections generally framed around its handling of religion in a school context rather than around any single scene or line.