A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi deals with a teenage girl in the year following the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. It is a story that can act as a warning of what can happen when we don’t treat people like… people. I thought it was a good book.
I purchased the special Target edition with bonus chapters, so I’ll comment about that as well.
Shirin is a sophomore in high school who grew up in America, but whose parents had immigrated from Iran. She chose to wear a headscarf, even though it caused trouble for her with her classmates. She also seems to have a huge chip on her shoulder, although she doesn’t realize it. You can’t particularly blame her, not when people give her one glance and assume she’s a terrorist or is weird. When Ocean James, a boy who is assigned as her biology partner, befriends her and later becomes something more, they both develop as people, and eventually, the community starts to come around as well.
A Very Large Expanse of Sea was entertaining. Shirin has a distinctive voice and you have to feel for her. Over time, you also start to see where she’s going wrong (although to be fair, the people around her aren’t saints either). I thought she was well done and realistic.
Themes
A huge theme in this story is how hatred can hurt yourself and the people that you care about. People looked at Shirin and automatically assumed that she hated America, or was a terrorist, or there was something wrong with her. As a result, they hurt their community when they tried to intimidate Ocean in an attempt to get him to break up with her. I guess I can’t say how because I don’t want to give away spoilers.
At the same time, Shirin hurt herself when she defaulted to hate for the people around her. Sure, a lot of the people in the school were jerks. Still, she hurt herself by shutting herself off. She said herself:
I could no longer distinguish people from monsters.
p. 110
It eventually worked itself out, but both she and the community had a lot to learn before they got to that point.
The Romance Aspect
While this is a story about teen romance, it’s really more about other things. Shirin pushes Ocean away for most of the story, even though she likes him. Even though he tells her repeatedly that he doesn’t care what other people think, she worries about how people will react to them being together. There is some kissing, but as the majority of the book is spent with Shirin trying to stay out of a relationship, there’s not too much of it. Still, first love is definitely one of the subplots of the story.
Bonus Chapters
The special edition that I bought came with bonus chapters told about Ocean’s reaction to meeting Shirin. It was interesting to see things from his point of view: his thoughts about his home life, sports, and what he thought of her for the first time. As of this writing, you can still buy it on Target’s web site. I thought the bonus chapters were interesting, but they don’t really provide more information than you already know after reading the book.
Final Thoughts
While I liked the book overall, I did think that the people’s hatred seemed exaggerated for that era. To be fair, I lived in Italy during the time that this story would have taken place, so I wasn’t really in the middle of American life at the time, but it didn’t feel like this from my perspective. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t pockets of places like this school where the people were jerks, I just don’t think it was the norm. At any rate, if people were only mildly bigoted, it wouldn’t have made such an entertaining story.
If you’re interested in a sweet love story between two people of different cultures, where they have to deal with a lot of bigotry, you might want to try A Very Large Expanse of Sea. I thought it was pretty good.